[rleigh]

There might me an opportunity for a company to enter this space, but then again maybe not.

When everything is a mess of ad hoc Perl, Python and R scripts to solve unique one-off problems, you might well find that there isn't a sufficiently common subset of functionality that people are prepared to pay money for. That is, while the need may be there, the business case may not be. It might be that most of the field are quite content with the status quo.

It's easier and cheaper to get some poorly-trained PhD students to wrangle badly-written and poorly-maintainable scripts than it is to pay a company to provide a robust and well-written solution instead. The "indentured labour" also distorts the supporting ecosystem. [I say this after having done a PhD in biomedical science.]

I remember one of my colleagues asking me to help him getting some special software from a particular group working [for DNA methylation analysis]. They wanted paying $10K for it IIRC. It was a complete mess, wouldn't work, had not documentation, and I didn't trust it was genuinely functional it was just such a state. For a one-off, maybe $10K was worth it, but if you only have 2-3 customers worldwide who will pay, it's not a viable business if the product works perfectly, let alone if it's a fragile disaster that barely works at all.