For the past 50 years, the life sciences industry has had a very robust, successful and profitable model for bringing new products to market. But the world has changed, and life sciences companies must now achieve greater productivity and a faster time to market in R&D in order to drive returns for their businesses now and in the future.

The life sciences industry must try to master how to operate most effectively in what will be a more connected and demanding world of R&D innovation. Opportunities for bringing innovative ways of working include: in-silico modelling and simulation, externalising parts of the R&D process through working with partners, and targeting new growth markets such as China or India. It is now time for life sciences companies to take advantage of our capabilities.

But delivering the promise of innovative ways of working, when cost and speed are key and security and compliance are non-negotiable, is a tough challenge. To this end, cloud-based R&D with advanced collaboration optimised for life sciences could hold the key.

The benefits of a collaborative approach

Collaboration is at the heart of productive and innovative scientific research. The ability to quickly and securely share and analyse results with your partners is a major driving force in accelerating time to market.

However, collaboration with third parties is tricky. You either need to open up your security firewall, which is risky and slow to set up, or use general file sharing platforms, which may not be secure – and aren’t integrated into your existing IT infrastructure.

Our BT for Life Sciences R&D platform helps address these challenges by delivering a secure collaborative environment, linked to the R&D applications you use, leveraging your existing IT investment. It delivers the high quality required by life sciences companies and meets many key regulatory standards.

Delivering the promise of in-silico

Computer-based, or in-silico, modelling and simulation reduces the need for lab work, saving time and money. Combine that with the latest advances in cloud computing and you have an opportunity to tap into and connect with an almost infinite universe of people, computing power and data sources.

In the same way we’re streamlining the research process, we’re also streamlining the work of scientists and IT professionals who spend a lot of time discussing, confirming and building the required computing environment. By working with software and content partners, such as Accelrys, we have been building orchestration and a “service store” into the platform. This virtual approach provides instant access to applications and information, so computational experiments and predictive simulations can be undertaken quickly and easily. As well as putting scientists at the heart of product development, this means the IT department is freed up to drive innovation and support new ways of working.

Overcoming the barriers

The challenges of commercial security and regulatory compliance are very real in the life sciences industry and it has to exercise extreme caution in adopting cloud computing. By optimising the service for life sciences the BT platform conforms to the industry’s stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements, and in doing so, reduces the barriers to adoption.

Our security credentials are second to none. We have a great deal of experience in building and managing highly secure environments for the healthcare and life sciences industry.

For instance, data segregation is designed into the platform architecture and companies can define the user controls to limit who can access which projects, applications and data sources.

In addition to your data being protected and segmented, the life sciences industry demands an environment that is suitable for its heavily regulated processes. Our hardware has been qualified in conformance with quality requirements that are driven by GxP directives. Every company has its own standards and quality requirements, so this qualified environment allows regulated applications to be deployed, if desired, enabling collaboration that meets the spectrum of quality requirements, whether in research and development, stage III trials or manufacturing.

Increase productivity, cut costs and speed time to market

Our Life Sciences R&D service enables you and your partners (biotechs, content providers, reagent suppliers, independent software vendors and clinical research organisations) to connect disparate internal and external research information – and the people behind it. And it helps create an environment that is:

Flexible – connecting only the people and partners on the programme, flexing computing resources up and down as required, only paying for what is needed and shutting it all down when the programme is over.

Collaborative – enabling scientists to swiftly communicate and share results with commercial and academic research partners, and access data sources and applications on our virtual server platform to run in-silico analysis.

Connected – allowing large datasets and applications to be moved within and between parties and across geographic boundaries safely and quickly through a robust and secure network supporting a collaborative environment that connects an extended ecosystem of partners, suppliers and colleagues.

Secure – recognising that security while working in a cloud environment is critical, data is segregated from any other data in a secure and monitored environment.

Conformant – delivering the quality and regulatory requirements that make an environment suitable for many regulated applications to be used collaboratively by partners who may have differing risk profiles.

Why BT?

The secret of successful external, cloud-based R&D is not computing power. It’s empowering people. By creating an enhanced collaborative working platform, our services empower individuals and help connect people and science.
Anyone can provide virtual servers. But can they help you extract as much value from the cloud as you should? Our strength lies in being able to integrate the people that make up the global pharmaceutical R&D community, not just data and applications.

BT already delivers compliant services for the pharmaceutical industry, operates the world’s largest financial services community and provides the world’s largest healthcare network. More importantly, we do all of this in a secure environment with data segmentation processes that are world class. We will also help you plan your migration from a physical to a virtual environment.

Global scale, local delivery

BT manages 2,200 platforms for 1,500+ customers around the world. Our scalable, flexible cloud services – integrated with the underlying network – are supported by:
• a focused investment in the cloud, to extend our reach and capabilities
• 45 global data centres with 500million sq ft capacity
• global network access in 170 countries
• 4,500 IT professional services experts, executing transformation plans
• $1billion investment in innovation each year – and creation of a global innovation platform
• a unique Client Compliance Services Centre of Excellence supporting our many GxP-regulated customers
• one of the largest security and business continuity practices in the world, with over 1,300 security professionals globally
• we monitor more than 100,000 customer devices from our Security Operations Centres around the world
• our achievement in delivering outstanding services globally to customers is recognised:
– 2011 World Communication Awards winner for Best Global Operator
– 2010 TMForum Innovation award winner for “cloud service broker” and “systems migration planning”
– 2010 Institute of Engineering and Technology award winner for Innovation in Telecommunications