Univa Solutions For Life Sciences

Life Sciences companies are under constant pressure from competitors, regulatory agencies, and the public to deliver more effective drugs to market faster. With significant cost and compliance constraints, as well as increasing stores of data to be processed, Life Sciences organizations (including clinical research organizations (CROs), pharmaceutical corporations and biotechs) face a number of challenges including:

• High volume and density of data
• Growing complexity of IT ecosystem
• Competitive and regulatory pressures

Today's life sciences organizations need IT infrastructure and management tools that can respond quickly to changing needs and, more importantly, enable rather than hamper the ability to innovate.

By grid-enabling in silico R&D, clinical simulation, and business intelligence tools, our customers are getting more work done in shorter timeframes while maximizing license utilization, increasing ROI, and realizing significant savings.

With Univa solutions for Life Sciences, your organization can achieve a range of proven benefits including:

• Analysis expansion
• Faster time to market
• Significant cost reductions

With the high volume and density of data required for processing in most R&D environments, along with the growing complexity of IT ecosystem and the pressures of competition and regulatory groups, life sciences organizations need IT infrastructure and management tools that can respond quickly to changing needs and, more importantly, enable rather than hamper the ability to innovate.

Univa solutions for accelerating in silico R&D, clinical simulation, and business intelligence tools mean our customers achieve greater levels of innovation in shorter timeframes while maximizing license utilization, increasing ROI, and realizing significant savings.

Our Life Sciences clients are finding more and more ways to leverage grid and cluster solutions in R&D and the data center. Here are a few of the areas where grid has delivered quantifiable business value for our customers:

• Drug Discovery – From sequence analysis to virtual high-throughput screening, in silico tools require high-performance compute power to process growing amounts of available data. By grid-enabling commercial or proprietary tools, organizations can process wider molecular libraries in search of new leads and can run jobs concurrently for reduced project timelines.
  
  "The Grid computing architecture recently developed by United Devices allows us to perform the same task in less than five working days using the power of hundreds of desktop PC's. High-throughput docking has therefore acquired the status of a routine screening technique."
  Novartis Researchers in Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 46:2656-2662
  
  
• Clinical Development – Customers are improving the speed and scope of PK/PD and other clinical data analysis tools by using Univa solutions to schedule and run jobs concurrently – now thousands more models can be analyzed at a time.
  
  "The Grid MP platform keeps track of all the data related to our job runs – where the job was executed, what type of machine, how long it took. So not only does the grid save us time, but in automating this function it allows us to define a validated process for job execution. That goes a long way toward achieving FDA compliance."
  Mark Sale, Global Director of Research Modeling and Simulation
  GlaxoSmithKline
  
  
• Business Intelligence – Running ETL, text mining, and other data management tools on a Univa enterprise grid accelerates critical prescription data mining and reporting projects. This means minimized project timelines, improved accuracy and scope in reporting, and ultimately improved decision-making... not to mention the cost benefits of better utilizing existing resources.
  
  "The grid solution has literally changed our definition of what is possible. Where before we were able to scan only a few thousand articles a day, now we can examine 100,000 articles in the same amount of time. We can also pull out more concepts from and can rerun the data in different ways, rather than just once, to improve the precision and quality of what we learn. It's a dramatic increase in scope that analysts and researchers in other fields are going to want to achieve as well."
  Dr. Eric Bremer, Director of Brain Tumor Research
  Children's Memorial Research Center

In addition, Univa's alliances with key software vendors ensure that your most critical applications will operate at a highly increased rate of productivity.

	GlaxoSmithKline GSK's Solution for Pre-Clinical Analysis Read more
	CMRC & SPSS Children's Memorial Research Center and SPSS Apply Grid to Text and Data Mining Read more
	Novartis Novartis Grid Case Study published by Intel Read more

• More

Whether you're looking to expand the computing capacity of your R&D systems or trying to drive costs out of your data center, Univa has the proven technology to meet your needs.

Specific use cases include:

• Streamlining the R&D Computing Environment
• Enabling an FDA-Compliant Environment
• Reducing Cost and Complexity of the IT Infrastructure
• Increasing R&D Application Throughput

Streamlining the R&D Computing Environment

For Life Sciences organizations that operate heterogeneous, highly dispersed HPC environments, it is difficult to manage and ensure efficiency of the infrastructure. Expensive resources go underutilized, and application license utilization is less than optimal. In addition, researchers and scientists have to spend time dealing with the underlying infrastructure instead of focusing on what they are best at: driving innovation to contribute to business value.

With Univa solutions, Life Sciences customers can streamline their operations to make better use of existing resources. Our solutions abstract the complexities of the underlying environment away from the end user and provide the centralization, visibility and control to achieve a higher level of productivity.

Enabling an FDA-Compliant Environment

In order to be compliant with FDA regulations, clinical modeling teams must maintain detailed records about the processes used to model drug effects prior to trials. While most pharmaceutical companies have taken pains to validate hardware related to clinical modeling, in most cases the processes used are not validated and have little to no audit trail – damaging a company's ability to be compliant. Clinical development teams lack fine-grained control over the software versions, data files, and even physical workstations that are used during analysis, and it is increasingly time-consuming and difficult for clinicians to keep track of job execution data in order to meet compliance standards.

Univa solutions provide critical information for process validation and compliance. Our products provide a database and mechanisms to automate tracking and manage data storage. This unique approach greatly increases an organization's ability to be compliant while reducing the manhours spent on tracking and quality control. In addition, Univa technology provides the visibility needed to quickly view capacity and utilization across the environment and access real-time and historical reports on data processing.

Reducing Cost and Complexity of the IT Infrastructure

From the R&D computing labs to the enterprise data centers, the complexity and heterogeneity of Life Sciences IT organizations is growing. These facilities are costly to own and operate, whether used to power the corporate ERP system or pre-clinical data analysis.

With Univa solutions, companies can simplify the environment and drive out unnecessary costs, so that budget can be spent in more value added areas of the drug delivery cycle.

Increasing R&D Application Throughput

When IT constraints bottleneck your researchers' ability to produce compelling candidates, your business suffers. So most Life Sciences companies spend increasing amounts on HPC resources – in fact, this industry is one of the top consumers of HPC. But buying more hardware is not a scalable model – budget and IT complexity constraints are driving companies to seek new ways of delivering the capacity needed to power the drug development organizations.

With Univa, Life Sciences companies can dramatically increase processing capacity and application throughput. With our grid solutions, you'll unlock hidden capacity to power processing at new levels, without an investment in costly hardware.