BT and Accelrys Technologies Unlock Value in Big Data

Published on: May 30, 2013

Cloud-computing solutions and software enable researchers to garner insight from large, public-health datasets.

British Telecommunications (BT) and Accelrys are collaborating to provide solutions for analyzing massive datasets using BT for Life Sciences Cloud Compute Platform combined with Accelrys Enterprise Platform and Accelrys Pipeline Pilot software, the companies announced in a press release. The tools can be used to mine information on healthcare topics from very large datasets.

BT has collated publically available health system and social care information into a research repository intended for use by the life sciences and healthcare industries as well as academia, initially hosted in the United States and United Kingdom, but available for global access. Such data can provide valuable insight into a number of healthcare topics, such as disease prevalence, impact of ethnic mix and adverse drug reactions. However, the information is often contained in very large datasets and may be unstructured in nature. The datasets can be analyzed using the BT and Accelrys tools.

“The generation of ever-increasing amounts of health data is both a blessing and a curse, as they are data-rich, but often information-poor,” said Leif Pedersen, senior vice president of marketing, product management and corporate development at Accelrys, in the press release. “Working with BT, we’ve shown that we can deliver meaningful and valuable insights from these huge datasets.”