Accenture and Merck together with Amazon Web Services to perform scientific research and develop new drugs. They have recently announced their intention to implement an IT platform for organizations that perform scientific research. In particular, they will create a set of tools with which researchers will be able to aggregate and analyze the enormous amount of scientific data available to them from different sources.
The platform
Advances in science and technology – says Joe Miletich, senior vice president for research in Merck – offer unprecedented opportunities for the development of new therapies, but “the capitalization of these opportunities requires the ability to quickly find and explore associations among data sets that are increasing significantly in terms of size and number». The platform will be cloud-based and will also integrate reporting and workflow functions. To make the development of applications compatible with the platform easier and faster, the code will not be encrypted but open, so accessible to anyone. The use of shared tools will also make collaboration between the organizations involved in Research and Development more natural and simple.
Innovative scientific applications
According to the creators, this solution will open new perspectives for those who develop scientific content or IT solutions: it will be possible to create innovative scientific applications that can transform the user experience. Research organizations will be stimulated to imagine new processes and approaches in data-intensive research. Data-driven technologies are in fact one of the major health challenges of the future as companies that rely on more traditional business models risk being cut off from the market of the future.
