How is life different in the cloud?

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

One of the most notable changes in the culture of pharmaceutical research and development is the move towards collaboration and outsourcing as the business model. This has been driven, at least in part, by a shift from the development of traditional small-molecule drugs, to large molecule biologics, biomarkers and personalised medicine.

‘Biologics discovery and development will generally require collaboration with CROs, small biotechs or academia that have required IP, or are specialised in different segments of the biologics workflow, perhaps next gen sequencing or biomarker discovery,’ according to Anthony Uzzo, president and cofounder of Core Informatics. ‘This means that collaboration and outsourcing will become an inevitable part of biologics and precision medicine initiatives."…

On the informatics front, he continued: ‘Cloud solutions can effectively and efficiently capture and secure data that has been generated by CROs and collaborators who are outside of the client’s infrastructure. Think about all the money that large pharmaceutical companies spend on outsourcing and on collaborative research. If the partners are not all using the same platforms for data collection and sharing, a huge amount of valuable information will lack any scientific context.’ In contrast, it is relatively painless and cost-effective for the company and each of its collaborators to adopt the same cloud platform, and thus communicate seamlessly…

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