Cloud computing meets drug R&D

Drug makers are turning to Amazon, Google and Microsoft to adopt so-called cloud computing for their R&D efforts, with some noteworthy results, says Chemical & Engineering News. A recent article lists big guns Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and Genentech among those accessing large storage and computing power across the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Among applications that have been tried successfully so far are scalable proteomics data processing, bioinformatics sequencing, and development of models for antibody docking runs, according to the article.

In cloud computing, big time savings and reasonable cost are balanced by issues of programming, compatibility and corporate security.

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