Drifting in the Cloud

‘Cloud computing’ is a buzzword that caught my attention this week. It seems everything that was once firmly grounded – books, music, high street shops and even medical records – are drifting into the ‘cloud’. In a nutshell, this buzz concept means that users do not need to install or maintain any software themselves – all they’ll need is a computer and browser. They will harness the internet as a vast computing resource and connect to them and use them as needed.

Without realizing it, you may be a cloud user already. Facebook, Twitter, Email, YouTube, iTunes all allow electronic information to be stored and processed on computers in the ‘cloud’ and then delivered to you where and when you need it. In the healthcare industry, the web-based personal health records (PHR) is set to revolutionise communication between patients and physicians as both will be able to pull up medical records from the web.

Will pharma companies that run the clinical trials, which only tentatively shifted from ancient paper records to electronic data capture (EDC) and clinical trial management (CTM), embrace the Cloud? We are not sure.

Pharma giant Ely Lilly and Co uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for its R&D research. They have been ‘able to launch a 64 bit machine cluster computer working on bioinformatics sequence information, complete the work, and shut it down in 20 minutes’ and it only cost ‘$6.40’ (Dave Powers – Ely Lilly Associate Information consultant).

As pharmas seek to reduce time and cost of drug development, the demand for fully integrated, end-to-end clinical solutions will increase. Clinical cloud computing would not only enable a wide range of clinical applications to be tapped from anywhere but also allow for greater access to real-time information and enhanced collaboration between CROs and sponsors.

In relation to medical imaging, it is regrettable that many clinical sites still rely on CDs or specialised equipment to transfer DICOM images. Trial Wire was launched by IXICO as part of its effort to foster the adoption of a simple, web-based image transfer tool. Evidently, a complete cloud based image management is not available, even though its benefits are clear: reduce operational time, real-time access to trial images anywhere in the world, data sharing, enhanced collaboration, and accelerated error correction.

However, all this may just be wishful thinking. Let’s hope that pharmaceutical companies are prepared to drift into the clouds.