Physiome Sciences and its development collaborator, the University of Auckland in New Zealand will receive two of the first shipments of IBM’s new eServer* POWER4-based supercomputers. The system will enable Physiome Sciences to speed up its current capability to simulate complex models of cells, tissues and organs, and simulate the behavior of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Physiome Sciences’s goal is to incorporate information from protein pathways into computerized models of cells, organs, and disease states — laying the infrastructure for virtual drug discovery, said Dr. Jeremy Levin, CEO of Physiome Sciences. Our alliance with IBM will speed this process and enhance our technology capability to develop the leading in silico solutions.
For pharmaceutical and other biomedical researchers using Physiome Sciences’s simulation technology, the benefits will include significant time and cost savings, and better predictions about the effects of drug candidates on animals and humans. Users will be able to perform biological modeling that yields proprietary, company-specific insights into drug targets and disease mechanisms.
The alliance will enable Physiome Sciences to enhance its product offerings, which include CardioPrismTM and PathwayPrismTM. These technology platforms address critical drug discovery requirements in data integration, data analysis and modeling, resulting in better target identification and analysis of effects of novel drugs and drug toxicity.
IBM’s leadership in such areas as high-performance computing and research complements Physiome Sciences’s expertise in biological modeling, said Dr. James Coffin, director, IBM Life Sciences Solutions. Our complementary strengths will enable researchers to draw on cutting edge technologies to advance medical research and speed up the drug discovery process.
Through the agreement, IBM becomes Physiome Sciences’s preferred information technology supplier for high-performance computing, professional services and data integration. In addition, IBM will license the PathwayPrismTM technology from Physiome Sciences for its internal use. PathwayPrismTM utilizes Physiome Sciences’s revolutionary In-SilicoCellTM technology for building biological models. Physiome Sciences will write wrappers for its product offerings to run on IBM offerings, including IBM DB2* Universal Database and DiscoveryLink* integration software.
Further, IBM and Physiome Sciences will explore research collaborations to integrate complementary technologies in such areas as pattern discovery, gene expression analysis, and signal transduction pathways, which map biological activities within cells. IBM also will work with Physiome Sciences to promote open standards such as the CellMLTM, an XML-based language to develop computer models of cells, tissues and organs.
Designed to provide industry-leading performance for both commercial and technical workloads, POWER4-based systems will feature ground-breaking new technologies, such as the world’s first computer chip containing two processors; more than an order of magnitude improvement in bandwidth over today’s systems; and a new method of connecting devices that dramatically increases scalability by combining the benefits of leading architectures for server communications.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
