Garg Vibhav, Arora Suchir, Gupta Chitra
Mascon Global Limited, Healthcare and Life Sciences, 849 Phase -5, Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon, Haryana - 122016, India.
Comb Chem High Throughput Screen. 2011 Dec;14(10):861-71. doi: 10.2174/138620711797537085.
Continued advancements in the area of technology have helped high throughput screening (HTS) evolve from a linear to parallel approach by performing system level screening. Advanced experimental methods used for HTS at various steps of drug discovery (i.e. target identification, target validation, lead identification and lead validation) can generate data of the order of terabytes. As a consequence, there is pressing need to store, manage, mine and analyze this data to identify informational tags. This need is again posing challenges to computer scientists to offer the matching hardware and software infrastructure, while managing the varying degree of desired computational power. Therefore, the potential of "On-Demand Hardware" and "Software as a Service (SAAS)" delivery mechanisms cannot be denied. This on-demand computing, largely referred to as Cloud Computing, is now transforming the drug discovery research. Also, integration of Cloud computing with parallel computing is certainly expanding its footprint in the life sciences community. The speed, efficiency and cost effectiveness have made cloud computing a 'good to have tool' for researchers, providing them significant flexibility, allowing them to focus on the 'what' of science and not the 'how'. Once reached to its maturity, Discovery-Cloud would fit best to manage drug discovery and clinical development data, generated using advanced HTS techniques, hence supporting the vision of personalized medicine.
技术领域的持续进步推动了高通量筛选（HTS）从线性方法向通过系统级筛选实现的并行方法演变。在药物发现的各个步骤（即靶点识别、靶点验证、先导物识别和先导物验证）中用于高通量筛选的先进实验方法能够生成多达数TB的数据。因此，迫切需要存储、管理、挖掘和分析这些数据以识别信息标签。这一需求再次给计算机科学家带来挑战，要求他们提供匹配的硬件和软件基础设施，同时管理不同程度的所需计算能力。因此，“按需硬件”和“软件即服务（SAAS）”交付机制的潜力不容否认。这种按需计算，在很大程度上被称为云计算，正在改变药物发现研究。此外，云计算与并行计算的整合无疑正在扩大其在生命科学领域的影响力。速度、效率和成本效益使云计算成为研究人员“值得拥有的工具”，为他们提供了极大的灵活性，使他们能够专注于科学的“内容”而非“方式”。一旦成熟，发现云将最适合管理使用先进高通量筛选技术生成的药物发现和临床开发数据，从而支持个性化医疗的愿景。
