BT and Accelrys, Inc. have announced that the two companies are working closely together to help garner valuable medical insights from vast public health datasets, using BT for Life Sciences cloud compute solutions combined with Accelrys Enterprise Platform and Accelrys Pipeline Pilot.
The United Kingdom (UK) state-funded National Health Service (NHS) has been in existence for more than 60 years. During that period, the UK population has generated a wealth of health data and much of this information is computerized. In addition, a vast amount of information on the operational delivery of health care has been made available under the UK open data policy. Similar datasets are available in other countries, most notably from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States.
BT has collated publically available health system and social care information into a research repository intended for use by the life sciences and health care industries as well as academia, initially hosted in the United States and UK, but available for global access. Such data can provide valuable insight into a number of healthcare topics, such as disease prevalence, impact of ethnic mix and adverse drug reactions. However, the information is often contained in very large datasets and may be unstructured in nature.
The combination of BT's Cloud Compute platform, the Accelrys Enterprise Platform and Pipeline Pilot has proved capable of finding buried value in massive amounts of data. BT and Accelrys are focused on supporting the Big Data challenges of their customers. This initiative demonstrates the capabilities of their combined technology approaches as they focus through their collaboration on developing solutions to address the significant market need to unlock the value of large datasets. The mutual goal is to let the scientist focus on science and not worry about the complexities of information management, particularly in a cloud environment.
Accelrys, a Foundational Member of the BT for Life Sciences ecosystem, helps provide research solutions to scientists on a global basis and recently made its HEOS collaboration suite available on BT Cloud Compute platform. Accelrys solutions are being further integrated into the BT for Life Science R&D Workbench, which itself is built on the BT Cloud Compute IAAS platform. BT for Life Sciences was one of the first cloud services designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased research and development productivity.
"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," said 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."
Bas Burger, President of Global Pharmaceutical & Chemical for BT Global Services, said "Building on the launch of BT for Life Sciences last year, we are excited that our continued collaboration with Accelrys is bringing new innovations to the life sciences industry. By making it easier for scientists to gain valuable medical insights from anonymous data buried in large datasets, we can help provide the interpretation of health outcomes. Working together, BT and Accelrys are making such patient outcomes analysis available to those companies developing drugs, enabling real-world outcomes that can be linked to the drug development pipeline."