BT launches life sciences R&D into cloud

BT has this week launched a new cloud service aimed at supporting and accelerating research and development (R&D) activities in life sciences.

BT for Life Sciences R&D is claimed to be the first cloud service to foster industry-specific, collaborative R&D work, while also complying with its information security and industry regulatory and compliance requirements.

The provider said it would provide scientists in pharmaceutical, biotech, devices and diagnostics companies, as well as academia and government, the often large-scale computing and management resource needed to develop new drugs and other innovations.

Bas Burger, BT Global Services president of Global Commerce, stated that the pharmaceutical industry was facing extreme challenges, where patent protected revenues are at risk and R&D productivity is declining, resulting in lower revenues, despite the continued rise in the cost of bringing new drugs to market.

“Now companies can potentially reduce research costs and accelerate time to market by collaborating with third parties in a secure and compliant environment, and bring innovative solutions to market faster through computer simulation and modeling,” he stated. “This aims at helping them develop new products faster, with lower costs and increased revenues.”

The new cloud will use various elements of BT’s portfolio, but a partnership with molecular modeling and simulation software company Accelrys, will use its specialist scientific applications in the new R&D cloud and, in turn, offer the partner’s customers on-demand infrastructure services.

BT’s Assure portfolio will secure and segregate the new cloud platform by offering the ability to design data encryption, anonymisation, risk management and resilience into the applications it will run.

The platform will also offer BT One for global collaboration and unified communications capabilities, BT Connect for high-capacity secure networking to allow for private, hybrid and public clouds Interoperability, BT Advise’s professional services to manage migration, orchestration and support, and Bioteam cloud design and consulting services.

BT added that the new platform will initially build on BT’s On Demand Compute service, with a compliance ‘wrap’ to meet quality assurance requirements according to the GxP3 standard for qualification.

The company said the its new cloud service would specifically allow researchers and scientists to construct and orchestrate ‘in silico’ workflows, data pipelines and predictive simulations to identify new pharmaceutical targets and drug candidates.