Cloud Computing Leads to Pharmaceutical Discovery

Antivirals, Antibiotics, NSAIDs, etc. the list of modern pharmaceutical discoveries goes on and on, but even with all this many diseases prone to drugs, the the side effects of the treatment is much worse! So we wonder, are there better and healthier drugs entering the market?

Well, the simple truth is that it costs too much. The way drug discovery works is that you recognize possible prospects and analyze them for potential toxicity and their usefulness based on their Biology. This can be quite expensive!

Predicting toxicity is one of the biggest challenges. Even after so many years of funding, scientists are still trying to predict toxic side effects. Investing in supercomputers or state-of-the-art data centers can help scientists with their work since recognizing which compounds will cause a desired biological error is the essence of what they do! At least that was the story since recent times…

With Cloud Computing you no longer need high cost, high powered technical infrastructure. Researchers from Molplex, an up-and-coming medicine discovery company; Newcastle University; and Microsoft Research Connections are currently working together to use cloud computing to assist scientists in providing new medicines to a much more affordable price all over the world.  This shared partnership has helped Molplex develop "Clouds Against Disease", a contribution of high quality drug discovery services based on a new scientific discovery stage.

The “Clouds Against Disease” (Shared partnership among the three) computational platform runs algorithms to analyze the numerical properties of molecules. For this reason, Molplex now has the ability to produce drugs by getting results of a large scale than before!

The Molplex system gives researchers the opportunity to pay more attention to functional issues when showing compounds. Will the compound be toxic? Will it be easy to digest? How long will it remain in the body? This process has the ability to identify which drugs will be more suitable for which people. This is quite helpful in that the scientists can now predict if the drug is toxic for humans before wasting their time creating it!

The normal procedure would be to buy, provision, and then manage 100 or more physical servers. Those who are taking this approach will most definitely have to spend thousands if not millions of dollars in order to start research on drugs. This is a big inconvenience for those who want to have their hand in medical discovery. There is software that will eliminate this initial start up costs by giving companies the opportunity to pay for only the resources they use.

One of the more significant impacts of “Clouds Against Disease” is its ability to assure that drug discovery affordable for tropical diseases. Since the only issue is making sure that the cost is radically reduced, it has the potential to make sure that numerous diseases around the world will have the potential of being managed by finding cures.

Cloud Computing is in the heart of making all this a reality. Low costs and faster more efficient results will make sure that drug therapies can be tested and even predicted to be toxic or not. Millions of people around the world will have Cloud Computing to thank!