I'm the maintainer of zigler (https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts:
1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private.
2) I have a vue.js component that does DNA editing, and one of the features is DNA sequence alignment, and so I had claude write the smith-waterman lalign algorithm in zig, and it compiles to wasm, and this plus going from O(N^2) to O(N) dropped the runtime of an alignment from 30s to a few hundred ms, in both cases so much better than ~5m using a web SAAS, good enough that I can render alignments on-demand, and I don't have to do a storage layer for alignments.
https://github.com/Vidala-Labs/opengenepool/tree/master/src/...
you can play with it at:
https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com
Two sequences may be aligned by right-clicking a sequence name when a sequence is loaded, it will align the two sequences (you'll have to create a second sequence as it forbids aligning a sequence with itself).
Why zig? Because it just makes things like cross-compilation easier (microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!), and has less footguns, and doesn't hide away things you might care about. Most of the things i build with zig don't really have a concern about memory safety, or have such trivial memory patterns that it's easy to verify by eye that they're memory safe.