3 vendors seek to advance drug discovery with new platform

Accenture, Merck and Amazon Web Services have jointly launched an effort to build a new informatics research platform for medical research.

The cloud-hosted platform from Amazon, aimed at the life sciences industry, is expected to improve productivity, efficiency and innovation in early stages of drug development, and help researchers and informaticists quickly aggregate, access and analyze data from multiple sources.



Data will be available from a single set of interfaces with workflow, reporting and analytics capabilities, according to the vendors. Merck will be the first pharmaceutical company to use the platform, which will enable users to improve business intelligence, more quickly develop new products and services, and also serve biotechnology and science research organizations, according to the participating companies.

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“The convergence of numerous scientific and technological advances provides unprecedented opportunities to translate novel insights into human disease biology into meaningful therapies,” says Joe Miletech, senior vice president of research at Merck. “Capitalizing on these opportunities requires an ability to rapidly find and explore associations across data sets that are increasing dramatically in size and number.”

Accenture is forming a coalition of clients to govern the platform and expand its capabilities, the vendor notes, which could support opportunities for pre-competitive collaboration by stakeholders.