BT and Accelrys have expanded their joint efforts to give life sciences researchers access to web-based software tools and data. The companies have combined their respective technologies again to help researchers mine massive data sets from U.K. and U.S. sources for valuable knowledge.
Last week Accelrys ($ACCL) and BT revealed that Accelrys' Enterprise Platform and Pipeline Pilot software would be used on top of BT's BT for Life Sciences cloud computing platform. They noted how BT has channeled public data sets from health systems and social care sources into a research repository for researchers. Such data are often unstructured and difficult to organize, and Accelrys' software has shown some ability to pull needles of knowledge from the data haystack.
Accelrys had already made its HEOS tool available on BT's life sciences cloud, which the telecom giant released last year as a tailor-made solution for drugmakers and researchers based on its previous infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) offering. Both Accelrys and BT have an interest in life sciences companies adopting new technology to perform research in "the cloud," which can mean studies involving parties in separate locations, each with access to web-connected software and data to advance their work.
Now the companies have used their technologies to tackle a piece of the data overload problem in healthcare and pharma.
"The generation of ever-increasing amounts of health data is both a blessing and a curse, as they are data-rich, but often information-poor," Leif Pedersen, senior vice president of marketing, product management and corporate development, Accelrys. "Working with BT, we've shown that we can deliver meaningful and valuable insights from these huge datasets."
- here's the release