BT And Accelrys Help Scientists Gain Valuable Medical Insights From Big Data

May 30, 2013 8:20am

Innovations in cloud solutions help utilize public health data to gain meaningful insight from massive datasets - so far shown nearly impossible with other technologies

SAN DIEGO, May 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BT and Accelrys, Inc. today 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.

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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."

About BT

BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to its customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Openreach.

In the year ended 31 March 2013, BT Group's revenue was £18,017m with profit before taxation of £2,501m.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.

For more information, visit www.btplc.com

About Accelrys, Inc.

Accelrys, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACCL), a leading provider of scientific innovation lifecycle management software, supports industries and organizations that rely on scientific innovation to differentiate themselves. The industry-leading Accelrys Enterprise Platform provides a broad and flexible scientific solution optimized to integrate the diversity of science, experimental processes and information requirements across the research, development, process scale-up and early manufacturing phases of product development. By incorporating capabilities in applications for modeling and simulation, enterprise lab management, workflow and automation, and data management and informatics, Accelrys enables scientific innovators to access, organize, analyze and share data in unprecedented ways, ultimately enhancing innovation, improving productivity and compliance, reducing costs and speeding time from lab to market.

Accelrys solutions are used by more than 1,300 companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, energy, chemicals, aerospace, consumer packaged goods and industrial products industries. Headquartered in San Diego, California, USA, Accelrys employs more than 200 full-time PhD scientists. For more information about Accelrys, visit www.accelrys.com.

SOURCE Accelrys, Inc.