(Page 1 of 1)
Pharma and biotech companies have so far tended to use cloud computing services for drug development research, not clinical trials. IBM and other smaller tech companies would like to change all that, though.
Additionally, applying cloud computing for data analysis to aid patient care is catching on. As cloud computing extends to clinical data analysis, which would be considered private information, security will loom larger as an issue for drug development companies.
The benefits of using the cloud to store, manage, and analyze clinical data are similar to those for other drug development work. The cloud offers time on gigantic, dispersed infrastructures on a pay-as-you-go basis. It is estimated that 8–12% of clinical trial costs come from the need to move data around among various trial sites, comparing the data as it is being created, according to Erich Clementi, vp of strategy and GM of enterprise initiatives at IBM.
Additionally, for projects that require heavy data crunching, cloud computing enables vast amounts of processing at a lower cost. For example, Jeffrey T. Leek, Ph.D., assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and colleagues used an internally developed, open-source cloud-computing platform called Myrna for calculating differential gene expression in large RNA sequencing datasets.
Running an analysis for a single RNA sequence on one laptop could take up to three weeks to complete, Dr. Leek explained. In contrast, by renting computers for cloud computation services for $65, Dr. Leek said he could get results back in an hour and 45 minutes. Continued....
