From Excel spreadsheets to automation and robots: One biotech company's journey of IT discovery

Robots could be helping out Horizon Discovery's scientists with their lab work in future. It's no secret that organisations across the world are generating more data than ever before. But for those in the genomics field, the data challenge is not only bigger than ever, it may be bigger than anyone else's: it's thought that in the coming years, the field will generate more data than any other industry. For Juergen Harter, not only is his organisation characterised by huge volumes of data, until recently it was also characterised by Excel spreadsheets used to store vital business data. Harter is the VP of information systems at Horizon Discovery, a biotech company based in the English city of Cambridge, which also has sites in the US and in the Austrian capital of Vienna. The company provides services from gene editing to modelling, to support the world's largest pharmaceutical companies in drug development.