Grid for Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Challenges

                  
Hosts: Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

               

A recently published 451 GARS (Grid Adoption Research Service) has highlighted the increasing interest in Grids in the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare sector.

Biomedicine is one of the major users of the EGEE infrastructure in three distinct areas: 

Medical Imaging, especially the compute-intensive area of image co-registration. This enables techniques such as ‘virtual biopsies’ for cancer diagnosis avoiding invasive surgical procedures, improving quality-of-lie for patients and helping reduce the cost of medical treatment.
Bio-informatics: applications ranging from removing aberrations from microscope images to portals enabling users in areas like protein sequence analysis, as well as complex workflows to streamline processing & management of biological data.
Drug Discovery: using the EGEE Grid infrastructure to accelerate the search for candidate drug molecules against neglected diseases.

This EGEE-II Industry Day will expertly demonstrate the benefits of Grid both for pharma and biotech firms. Additionally attendants will come away with a better understanding of why hospitals are seen to be natural adopters of Grid technology due to their need to share data & tackle specific challenges around storage & medical images. Ultimately, the Grid will provide the backbone for electronic health records and new medical infrastructures.

• EGEE-II's Benefits for Business
• EGEE Developments for Bio-Informatics
• Case Studies from early adopters of EGEE's next-generation Grid middleware, gLite
• Case studies and discussions on Medical Data & Records Management
• Evaluations of a range of key healthcare tools & technologies:virtual labs for infectious diseases;
  

   CT brain perfusion studies; national transplant databases; Interactive Grid access for USCT; virtual screening.

WISDOM (Wide In-Silico Docking on Malaria) is a Drug Discovery Initiative cited as a a successful Grid adopter in the 451 GARS Report. WISDOM has been successfully deployed against diseases like malaria and avian flu, testing millions of potential drugs in a short period of time. Virtual Screening Challenges have demonstrated its impact beyond malaria, indicating how the method developed can be extended to all diseases, reducing the high costs involved in developing drugs and opening up exciting industrial perspectives.
WISDOM Booth: Visit the stand and see the WISDOM Live Demo showing throughout the day.

Business players and representatives from healthcare can interact with EGEE representatives and Grid experts and learn about the EGEE framework through which they can move forward with the adoption of its Grid technologies.
Robert Harakaly from the EGEE-II Industry Forum Steering Committee will be on hand to offer support for the adoption of gLite.
The Slovak Ministry of Health is represented by Minister Ivan Valentovic.