InforSense partners with GSK to enable virtual drug discovery

The project is sponsored by Simdat – a program funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme designed to test and enhance Grid data technology for product development and production process design.

In addition to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), project partners included NEC Europe, BioFocus DPI, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, IT Innovation and Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing.

The project at GSK involved setting up a secure Grid enabled environment to support the electronic outsourcing of data analysis and annotation of biological data to third parties -thus enabling virtual outsourcing.

The system, which is built using InforSense workflows, runs across a test-bed comprising five different remote sites and incorporates data services from two external companies. This demonstrates how a once fully internal system of analytical tools and databases for sequence analysis, annotation and ‘drugability’ can now be distributed across a number of organizations.

The project delivers a more collaborative approach to drug discovery, bringing increased flexibility and efficiency to the process, while still ensuring the data exchange is secure and controlled, the two companies said.

Moustafa Ghanem, director of research at InforSense, said: “We are seeing a growing interest in tools and software to support the technical and business process aspects of virtual organizations. Companies such as GSK are looking at outsourcing many aspects of their business and InforSense is providing them the infrastructure to do so.”