IBM establishes new life sciences consulting practice
The new Global Life Sciences Consulting and Solutions practice will help biotech and pharmaceutical research and development organizations to use information technology to accelerate the development of new medical treatments. Existing and future life sciences partners will now be able to benefit from IBM's consulting, systems integration and strategic outsourcing knowledge in the areas of data management, knowledge management and e-business services.
"Information technology is key to modernizing the drug discovery and development process," said Frank Roney, General Manager of Business Innovation Services at IBM Global Services. "We're drawing on IBM's extensive services capabilities and expertise to help companies transform their R&D units into more efficient and competitive operations."
The life sciences industry's need for information technology services is continuing to grow according to a recent Frost & Sullivan study done for IBM. The study predicted that life sciences companies will spend nearly $6.5 billion on IT services by 2004.
"This announcement underscores the reason we formed an alliance with IBM -- its ability to provide an unparalleled breadth and depth of technology and services," said Frank Gleeson, President & CEO of MDS Proteomics. "We have successfully integrated IBM's high performance computing infrastructure across a variety of platforms and industry-specific consulting and integration services with MDS Proteomics' biology expertise, bioinformatics capability and leading-edge proteomics research techniques. The result is rapidly advanced proteomics research which will, ultimately, speed the development of more efficient and effective medicines."
IBM is currently developing a portfolio of solutions and services to help customers create efficient environments for drug discovery and clinical development. Its initial suite of offerings includes knowledge management, for which IBM will provide the technology infrastructure and services to help researchers and scientists find and share information and knowledge through teams and research communities and data management and integration tools, that will incorporate IBM's services to help companies manage the growing amounts of genomic, proteomic and other research data supporting drug discovery. Solutions will be designed to leverage IBM's DiscoveryLink technology to simplify data gathering and analysis, improve research and development cycles, and lower drug development costs.
Other planned services will include clinical trial e-enablement solutions, designed to help pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other companies take advantage of the Internet to improve efficiency and shorten the cycle time of clinical trials. With its business partners, IBM also plans to implement solutions for electronic data capture, data management and hosting and systems integration, ranging from Web site and application infrastructure to outsourcing.
IBM plans to roll out the new offerings in phases across the pharmaceutical R&D and biotechnology sectors.