4 ms·

As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting? The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more h

As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting? The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.

ggm 10mo ago
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry? A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning. Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
- biophysboy 10mo ago
  I think you misread it a bit. On the bioinformatics point, I was addressing some text in the link. I don’t mean to belittle people that work in healthcare, just suspicious how Palantir secured contracts.
- adolph 10mo ago
  Yeah, ontology is a key word. Its like the best concepts from things like Informatica and Pachyderm and Snowflake, structured in a semi-sane data security model and certified with all the fedramp whatnot you need to make cloud saas work for enterprise.
adolph 10mo ago
Yeah, it is dead boring until you hit the real world of trying to make a data request from an IRB which doesn't talk to the IT folks who don't really know the ins and outs of the data they steward but have their own forms and approvals and bespoke deidentification process, . . . once your org is in that state then Foundry starts looking really good. Taking months to sort out getting a csv into your free agnostic workflow tools wasn't fine before, but c19 really made the tool's strengths clear and people want to retain that increased velocity. Like the iPod, if you are Cdr Taco it is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." If you are a normal person struggling with meaningful data in the enterprise and see all the things packaged together tidily, then iPod economics happen.
- biophysboy 10mo ago
  Its possible I was too dismissive. This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I think I'm jaded/cynical because there is an endless graveyard of bad software tools in this world.
  - adolph 10mo ago
    > This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely. It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.

ggm 10mo ago

Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry? A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning. Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?

biophysboy 10mo ago
I think you misread it a bit. On the bioinformatics point, I was addressing some text in the link. I don’t mean to belittle people that work in healthcare, just suspicious how Palantir secured contracts.
adolph 10mo ago
Yeah, ontology is a key word. Its like the best concepts from things like Informatica and Pachyderm and Snowflake, structured in a semi-sane data security model and certified with all the fedramp whatnot you need to make cloud saas work for enterprise.

adolph 10mo ago

Yeah, it is dead boring until you hit the real world of trying to make a data request from an IRB which doesn't talk to the IT folks who don't really know the ins and outs of the data they steward but have their own forms and approvals and bespoke deidentification process, . . . once your org is in that state then Foundry starts looking really good. Taking months to sort out getting a csv into your free agnostic workflow tools wasn't fine before, but c19 really made the tool's strengths clear and people want to retain that increased velocity. Like the iPod, if you are Cdr Taco it is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." If you are a normal person struggling with meaningful data in the enterprise and see all the things packaged together tidily, then iPod economics happen.

biophysboy 10mo ago
Its possible I was too dismissive. This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I think I'm jaded/cynical because there is an endless graveyard of bad software tools in this world.
- adolph 10mo ago
  > This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely. It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.