At Merck, the 30-person bioinformatics group is one-third computer scientists, one-third natural scientists and one-third that rare breed -- the bioinformatician -- with a dual background in science and IT. "To do [informatics] correctly you need to blend scientific skills and IT skills. Many on our staff are scientists with strong IT backgrounds," Pfizer’s Roberts says. "Otherwise you get technology without a purpose."

That partnership is particularly vital because most pharmaceutical companies are doing a combination of building some tools in-house, licensing software, and partnering with or buying up companies that already have a piece of the technology. The main reason for these acquisitions is that most can’t find enough qualified individuals to keep up with their demand for new tools, and their core business remains drug, not software, development. "Our internal resources don’t come close to matching our demand for tools," says Ken Fasman, vice president and global head of research and development informatics at Waltham, Mass.-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Fasman works out of Waltham and oversees a staff of 55 worldwide.

In 1998, Bristol-Myers Squibb built its own Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), a database that allows the company to track DNA samples as they are sequenced, stored and analyzed by scores of different scientists. The choice to build rather than buy at that time was out of necessity. "None of the vendors offered the kind of flexibility we needed," Siemers explains. He needed a system that could be easily accessed by a scientist who was working at the bench with only three samples as well as by researchers examining 30,000 samples with a high-throughput screening device.

Although that LIMS is still in use at Bristol-Myers Squibb, the preference now is to buy informatics software and integrate it into the company’s custom-built systems. "Our philosophy is if we can find a tool from a vendor that will do the task, it’s in our interest to just go out and buy it," Siemers says. "Our business is drug development, not software engineering."

But hundreds of vendors in the informatics space combined with varying standards and platforms makes the integration task tricky. Even Pfizer, known for doing more informatics in-house than most, works with about 15 major vendors in this area. "It’s really become an integration job, and it’s very difficult," Roberts says. At Pfizer, Roberts uses simulation software from St. Louis-based Tripos, chemical databases from San Leandro, Calif.-based MDL Information Systems, and screening and visualization tools from Cambridge, Mass.-based Spotfire, just to name a few. "We work very closely with all of our partners and try to sway them to build to our standards," he says. "But frankly none of these systems are perfect, and we have to build a lot of bridges."