NEWS LABORATORY INFORMATICS
Pistoia Alliance calls for collaboration to build ‘Lab of the Future’
At The Pistoia Alliance’s annual EU member conference in London, the organisation’s president Steve Arlington, urged stakeholders to come together to help technology continue to drive change in the industry and to amplify R&D budgets. Other speakers, including
from Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and SAP, also discussed how future technologies like AI and the use of Real World Data (RWD) will contribute to the development of the lab. Throughout the conference, the goal was to identify key areas where The Pistoia Alliance can set up collaborative projects that will make a real difference to research and ultimately to patients. ‘For the past 20 years, the lab
many suppliers, a specialised new network, the development and deployment of new software, and the migration of petabytes of archived data from old hardware, in need of retirement, to new. The entire process will take many months, from the integration of the first new equipment in March until the last of the old storage is retired. Completion is expected by the end of 2018. The system integration is being led by STFC Scientific Computing Department (SCD), and the software and data management by CEDA. Jonathan Churchill, JASMIN systems
architect and manager for SCD, is part of the team that has designed and are now installing the upgrade that will be exploited by the ever-expanding JASMIN science communities. Churchill said: ‘Not only have we dramatically scaled out JASMIN storage, compute and networking, but the new storage and networking technologies will improve the user ‘experience’ and provide capabilities that we have never been able to make available to users before. The compute upgrade will provide not only much needed extra batch computing cores but also provide the deep, on-demand cloud computing capacity and flexibility that releases new analysis environments to our science communities.’
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has looked largely the same. But in that time, how scientists and researchers work and live has changed dramatically. If pharmaceutical companies want to support R&D outcomes that truly benefit patients, then building the Lab of the Future is paramount,’ commented Arlington. ‘R&D budgets in the life sciences are under greater strain than ever before. Couple this with increasingly stringent regulatory issues and the shifting political situation around Brexit – and pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to deliver. They must now seek ways to amplify their budgets through greater collaboration, cooperation, and data sharing, and by exploring future technologies that will change the lives of patients.’ A second, guest keynote
was given by William (Bill) Burns, former CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals and now a member of The Pistoia Alliance’s Advisory Board. Bill spoke to Alliance members on the current models of pharmaceutical R&D and the commercial challenges the industry faces. Bill discussed
how society’s desire for new medicines and healthcare intervention has grown, but that there is a funding gap in how innovations are delivered. He also discussed the need for pharmaceutical companies to accurately measure the medical benefit of a therapy for a patient so that society and payers reward a drug with a price that enables a return on the investment and risk taken by the shareholders. To enable this, Burns noted, innovation happens at the interfaces, not in the silos – and greater collaboration is required. As part of the conference,
a key agenda item was an update on The Pistoia Alliance’s President’s Series Hackathon held on the 12th and 13th of March. The theme was ‘Hack the Lab’ and the event brought together stakeholders from life sciences, healthcare, academia, and technology. The hackathon was
comprised of a series of challenges, focused on AI insight, the ‘Future Corner’, and health and safety for the ‘Lab of the Future’ (LoTF). Participants aimed to build prototypes to show how to use AI to interpret instrument logs, explore how new tools can transform the lab, and to find novel uses for datasets and associated lab data. Participants experimented with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana, as well as AR interfaces, VR headsets, and ‘smart’ glasses. Among the winners were a team from The University of Southampton, who created a ‘friendly’ lab safety assistant based on Alexa, using data from The Pistoia Alliance’s Chemical Safety Library. The Pistoia Alliance, a global,
not for profit alliance that works to lower barriers to innovation in life sciences R&D, is calling upon the industry to support the ‘Lab of the Future’ (LotF) through greater collaboration.
April/May 2018 Scientific Computing World
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