Accenture Expands Platform for Drug Discovery and Innovation with Creation of Life Sciences Partner Ecosystem

Accenture has created an open partner ecosystem designed to help independent software vendors (ISVs) and life sciences companies team more effectively to accelerate drug discovery efforts and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

The ecosystem is an integral part of the cloud-based informatics research platform that Accenture and Merck (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) are developing. Built on Amazon Web Services and supported by ongoing work between Accenture and AWS through the Accenture AWS Business Group, the platform is designed to help life sciences organizations improve productivity, efficiency and innovation in drug discovery.

Through the new ecosystem, ISVs will be able to leverage the platform’s use of open, industry-standard-based application programming interfaces (APIs) to easily integrate technology components, applications and content into the platform. This will enable life sciences companies to give researchers access to innovative, best-of-breed capabilities, such as small-molecule and biological-entity registration, biological assay data capture, genomics data analysis, image storage and analysis, and artificial intelligence.

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These capabilities will be available to life sciences companies within a common informatics framework that handles core infrastructure requirements such as data ingestion and cleansing, security and IP management, request management workflow, enterprise search, data governance and collaboration environments.

“While our life sciences clients need to be nimble in their ability to provide scientific researchers with leading technology capabilities, they are faced with legacy IT systems and complex processes that make integrating new solutions challenging,” said Brad Michel, managing director of Accenture Scientific Informatics Services. “The new ecosystem we’re creating around the Accenture research platform will offer immediate access to innovative tools, enabling life sciences companies to significantly reduce the time, expense and effort required to implement new technology solutions—accelerating drug discovery and delivering solutions to patients faster.”

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Hal Stern, associate vice president of IT Engineering at Merck Research Labs, said, “One of the key reasons we chose to collaborate with Accenture on the development of the research platform is because of their ability to enable and accelerate this technology partner ecosystem. Through the ecosystem, we are creating an environment that will make it easier for life sciences companies to on-board innovations from leading-edge technology vendors that really can advance science — whether experiment design and data management, visualization, or machine learning capabilities to improve decision making — and bring all this information together in a common platform and infrastructure for drug discovery.”

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Accenture is currently working with more than 30 ISVs and organizations to integrate their technology and content into Accenture’sresearch platform. These include the following ISVs who will be highlighting their work with Accenture in a developer workshop being held in Las Vegas on Nov. 28 in conjunction with AWS re:Invent 2018:

• ChemAxon, a provider of highly integrable software with chemical and biological intelligence for the life sciences, flavors, cosmetics, new materials, petro- and agro-chemistry industries;
• Clarivate Analytics, a global company offering trusted insights and analytics to help companies accelerate the pace of innovation, including a comprehensive suite of solutions for life science professionals;
• Dotmatics, a company specializing in scientific informatics solutions for the management, query and visualization of chemistry and biology data;
• SciBite, a provider of text mining, semantics and data intelligence within the biopharma and biotech industries;
• Scilligence, a company that delivers cross-platform, mobile cheminformatics and bioinformatics solutions; and
• Vyasa, a provider of scalable, deep-learning software and analytics for life sciences and healthcare organizations.

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