BT has launched what it says is the first cloud-based service for enabling collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased R&D productivity. The new service, named BT for Life Sciences R&D, is being developed to become a secure and segregated platform for scientists in pharmaceutical, biotech, devices and diagnostics companies, as well as in academia and government. It is designed to allow customers to comply with the industry’s stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements in a way that’s suitable for many regulated applications.
In addition to constructing and orchestrating in silico workflows and data pipelines to identify new pharmaceutical targets and drug candidates, the platform enables users to create global project groups. These groups can securely upload documents, share results and communicate via IM, voice, video or chat to analyse results in an environment that segments data and uses qualified hardware components and workflows specific to the pharmaceutical industry.
Supported by the BT Assure portfolio of security services, the BT for Life Sciences R&D platform builds on the company’s On Demand Compute service, with a compliance ‘wrap’ meeting the GxP requirements for qualification. This conforms to the quality and regulatory requirements that make an environment suitable for many regulated applications that can be collaboratively used where partners may have differing risk profiles.
Many scientific applications and data sources have been brought together within the platform to provide immediate functionality and ease of use, while embedded cloud orchestration tools simplify IT management and resourcing requirements. As part of this, BT has entered into an alliance with Accelrys to bring additional features to the platform. The alliance will enable use of Accelrys scientific applications in BT for Life Sciences R&D and provide on-demand services for Accelrys customers.
