Pharmaceutical

The aim of the pharmaceutical section is to enable researchers in the life sciences to access crucial information for biological research, mainly within the realm of Drug Target Identification and Validation. Grid will allow researchers to access not only locally available information (e.g. on a server within a pharmaceutical or biotech company), but also data from external, remote sites. In addition, Grid will accelerate the speed by which analyses is carried out, through the distribution of compute intensive tasks over multiple servers (such as local sequence alignments like BLAST, or multiple genome comparisons).

: Federated Portal

Issues addressed by the SIMDAT Pharma Activity:

Data in use at pharmaceutical companies represents considerable IP, and therefore security and accessibility issues are important, especially if the Grid structure encompasses multiple companies and academic sites. In general, academia presents highly valuable data in 100s of databases; but accessing these remotely can only be possible if security issues have been addressed in detail.
Analyses of potential drug target sequences needs to be carried out by interlinked applications that are organized in ‘pipelines’: in this case workflows need to be employed to allow (semi-)automated ‘pipelined prediction’ of target sequence relevance.
Life science databases suffer from a large heterogeneity; which makes a systematic approach to information highly difficult. To solve this issue, ontologies for databases and biological entities can be used.

Finally, keeping databases up to date and synchronized over multiple sites is a crucial task, to ensure that search results are identical over time and independent of geographical locations. In this respect, quality assurance plays a key role in a Grid approach for the pharmaceutical industry.