Why does a company that makes drugs hire people who write code?

My first ever experience in the field of precision medicine (imaging biomarkers, to be precise) was when I landed a 6-month co-op at Biogen. Back then, the idea of a pharma company having data scientists and image processing engineers was extremely surprising to me. Why would a company that makes drugs hire people who write code? Over the 3 years of my PhD involving close collaboration with two pharma companies, countless hours of reading technical papers and Fierce Biotech newsletters, I guess I've (re)discovered the Socratic method, I've learnt to rephrase my question - what is the business sense behind investing in biomarker development teams? I believe this has gotten me closer to finding the answer:

A strategic precision medicine approach, depending on the choice of biomarker, can help pharmas devise faster and potentially cheaper clinical trials through (a) biomarker enriched patient selection, (b) early response and futility assessment, (c) additional secondary endpoint data; or help establish dominance of a therapy with multiple contenders in the market through a companion diagnostic test to identify patients likely to respond.


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