On cloud nine

SAN DIEGO—BT and Accelrys Inc. have announced they will beworking together to combine their respective data solutions in order to minehelpful insight from massive public health repositories.

Combining BT's Cloud Compute platform with the Accelrys Enterprise Platform andPipeline Pilot has resulted in a technology pairing that has proven to be up tothe challenge of identifying useful information in vast quantities of data.Accelrys and BT continue to work toward additional solutions for the managementand analysis of big data with the goal of eliminating concerns regardinginformation management so that customers can focus on their research.

"The generation of ever-increasing amounts of health data is both a blessingand a curse, as they are data-rich, but often information-poor," Leif Pedersen,senior vice president of marketing, product management and corporatedevelopment at Accelrys, said in a press release. "Working with BT, we've shownthat we can deliver meaningful and valuable insights from these huge datasets."

BT has amassed publicly available health system and social care information ina research repository for use by the life-science industry, healthcare industryand academia. The repository is initially hosted in the United States and theUnited Kingdom, but it is also available for international access. The issuewith such datasets is the sheer size as well as the fact that they may lackproper structure.

In addition to BT's research repositories, David Brown, chief technologyofficer of BT Life Sciences, BT Global Services, says the United Kingdom andBritish government "have a program as part of their life-science strategy toopen up as much as possible the National Health Service and medical research."

Between this and the output generated from genomic sequencing—Brown notes that"one 10x human genome is around 1.2 terabytes of data"—there is an overwhelmingamount of data to examine and process. Cloud computing, for which Brown saysthe best days "are still to come," allows researchers to store and analyzethese massive amounts of data externally to manage costs and limit the need forextensive in-house infrastructure.

Andy Leuthe, senior director of Product Marketing for Accelrys, says big datamanagement is one of the leading issues facing the industry today.

"Big Data is a challenge faced by a variety of different industries. Generallyspeaking, regardless of the industry, today's use of technology generates atremendous amount of data. Mining and analyzing that data has the potential tounlock a tremendous amount of value for organizations," Leuthe notes.

"Specifically for biotechs and pharmaceutical organizations, the amount of datagenerated is significant and probably as an industry may be near the top as faras data generated and data consumed. The Big-Data challenge for the companiesAccelrys serves is trying to find that next big discovery in the tidal wave ofdata."

The two companies announced a formal partnership in April of last year toprovide pharmaceutical and biotech organizations with solutions from Accelrysmade available on and delivered by BT's cloud services. Accelrys' solutionscontinue to be integrated into the BT for Life Science R&D Workbench, whichis built on the BT Cloud Compute IAAS platform. In addition, Accelrys recentlymade its HEOS collaboration suite available on BT Cloud Compute platform, andis a foundational member of the BT for Life Sciences ecosystem.

"Building on the launch of BT for Life Sciences last year, we are excited thatour continued collaboration with Accelrys is bringing new innovations to thelife-science industry," Bas Burger, president of Global Pharmaceutical &Chemical for BT Global Services, commented in a statement. "By making it easierfor scientists to gain valuable medical insights from anonymous data buried inlarge datasets, we can help provide the interpretation of health outcomes.Working together, BT and Accelrys are making such patient outcomes analysisavailable to those companies developing drugs, enabling real-world outcomesthat can be linked to the drug development pipeline."