The Silicon Review ^Asia

Accenture and pharmaceutical company Merck has made an announcement that both the companies will collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a cloud-based platform for medicine. The development aims to make innovations faster in drug and development research.

Both the companies decided to collaborate with AWS few weeks after Deloitte and Vineti announced a similar cloud-based precision medicine platform development.

According to Accenture and Merck, the creation of the cloud platform will be carried out in open application program interfaces, it will allow researchers to connect, to lower barriers to entry for app developers, content providers and others looking to bring new capabilities to market.  

The new cloud platform will help the researchers to aggregate, access and analyze data from multiple applications, enabling new approaches to data-heavy research. The partnership will make Merck the first ever pharmaceutical company to use the new platform. The platform leverages secure AWS cloud services to boost speed and drive operational efficiency.

According to Accenture, the company is gathering different clients from pharmaceutical, biotech and another scientific background for helping to platform's capabilities, offering an opportunity for pre-competitive industry collaboration.

“Pharmaceutical and biotech R&D is evolving rapidly, with advances in biological sciences generating an increase in the volume and diversity of research data,” said Brad Michel, managing director of Accenture Scientific Informatics Services.