Throw intuitive user interfaces and data visualisation into the mix and you've pretty much covered what 80 per cent of the current software does. But a new breed of software is coming to the life sciences that will help to revolutionise the way research is performed and commercialised. For ethical and other reasons, it is not feasible to conduct experimental studies of disease and its treatment on humans. Instead, animal models are used.
Animals provide the best known surrogate for humans in the laboratory.
This is true of circulatory systems, locomotory and sensory systems, and so on. Looking into the crystal ball, eventually software will be sophisticated enough to model complete organisms virtually - in software. But it will happen. The forerunners of these software systems already exist. Eventually these systems will scale up to model multiple, interconnected pathways and processes, as a realistic model needs to show how multiple pathways interconnect and affect each other.