IBM and MDS Proteomics form alliance to speed drug development

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will be the preferred supplier of hardware, software and services to MDS Proteomics.

By Editor on Jan 31, 2001

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will be the preferred supplier of hardware, software and services to MDS Proteomics. The two companies also plan to establish a public research database of protein analyses, accessible to pharmaceutical researchers, universities, scientists and others via the Internet. They will also collaborate on research projects to solve complex, computationally intensive problems related to biotechnology.

The partnership has been formed specifically to understand the interactions among proteins that trigger chemical reactions in cells and cause diseases such as cancer, AIDS and depression.

"Once you know the role that a protein plays in a disease, it is possible to develop drugs that target the protein and treat the disease," said Frank Gleeson, President and CEO of MDS Proteomics. "Large pharmaceutical companies are under significant pressure to increase the productivity of their drug discovery process, and shorten the drug development time frame, in order to meet the annual growth rates expected by their shareholders. Through our strategic alliance with IBM, we are applying breakthrough information technology to improve our understanding of how proteins function, in order to put drug design and development on a faster track."

To achieve these goals, MDS Proteomics is deploying a supercomputer infrastructure. The configuration includes three superclusters of IBM eServer systems running Linux and UNIX, and high-performance data management, disk and tape storage systems. In conjunction with MDS Proteomics' fault-tolerant software, these systems will assist to accelerate the process of identifying, analyzing and explaining the function of proteins.

The supercomputer cluster will process output from a network of mass spectrometers and a combination of IBM's DB2 Universal Database and Shark disk and Linear Tape Open storage systems, will provide a high-speed solution for storing, managing, accessing and retrieving enormous quantities of protein sequence data.

"We selected DB2 and IBM to provide us with a cluster-based scalable system for the long-term," said Christopher Hogue, MDS Proteomics CIO. "We believe that our data-intensive discovery platform could generate enough information to greatly expand the scientific and medical communities' understanding of human biology and disease."

The two companies also will work together to establish BIND (Biomolecular Interaction Network Database), a publicly available bioinformatics database that will allow researchers worldwide to submit and review results of research about molecular interactions and the detailed cellular mechanisms of life.