Novel drug discovery leverages SIMDAT Grid technology

“One of the most important R&D strategies to achieve a significant gain of efficiency is to tap into external knowledge and expertise through a network of external alliances, sharing the risk, reward and control. Given the large investments in drug research, Virtualisation provides a great savings potential,” summarizes Professor Ulrich Trottenberg, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI, the SIMDAT project co-ordinator, the current challenges in pharmaceutical drug discovery.

GSK, with its firm foundation in science and a track record of turning its research into powerful, marketable drugs, spends more than £300,000 (US$562,000) every hour to find new medicines to treat six major disease areas – asthma, virus control, infections, mental health, diabetes and digestive conditions. GSK is also a leader in the important area of vaccines and develops new treatments for cancer.

“With the distributed nature and diverse location of biological data for disease and medical treatment, it is becoming vital to be able to fast and flexible connect to these resources. Grid as a key part of Information Technology supports the organisations’ rapid movement into the virtualised and now more globalised information market,” says Rob Gill, Head of Biology Domain Architecture at GSK. “The SIMDAT Grid technologies developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), NEC, Inpharmatica (Galapagos), InforSense and Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI provide a new business model in the life science sector, which can be considered as a success of the project as a whole.”
Usually, establishing new relationships by creating a new virtual organisation (VO) may take up to several months. But the “Data Grid” paradigm can reduce this to weeks or even days.


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