Pharma-1: B2A Prototype

This prototype aims at demonstrating the usefulness of Grid technology for the execution of pharmaceutical workflows across industrial and academic institutions.


Download Movie: WMV (8,6 MB)


Summary

GSK’s Master Sequence Analysis Pipeline (MSAP) has been implemented into the KDE workflow tool. The execution of the MSAP is comprised of local and remote components, which are implemented as GRIA services at industrial and commercial partners.


Master Sequence Analysis Pipeline

Justification of the prototype

The B2A prototype evaluates a new Pharma collaboration scenario and reflects current outsourcing trends within the pharmaceutical area. From the perspective of the involved industrial and academic partners it paves the way to extend their existing business models and opportunities. As an immediate enhancement of the B2B scenario this implementation demonstrates the advantages resulting from up taking academic knowledge within an industrial setting.


Results achieved

Within the Pharma activity technologies in the areas of security (End-to-End framework, DAC), semantics (Semantic Broker) and data (IGOR file system) have been developed. Beyond those the current Pharma prototype uptakes the latest versions from the integrated Grid infrastructure (GRIA) and workflow technology (KDE).
In addition, SIMDAT-Pharma technologies are integrated into the wEMBOSS framework that contains EMBOSS-like analysis services. This system is quite popular in the bioinformatics community, especially in the academics organizations.


Business to Academia Prototype (B2A)

Lessons learned in the project

Grid-enable partnerships have the potential to open up options that are not possible in traditional business relationships. The integrity of data and results are of key importance and success will strongly depend on the use of open but trusted standards and open tool suites.