(11a) Collaborative Simulation Development Accelerated By Cloud Based Computing and Software As a Service Model

Simulations are increasingly used in pharmaceutical development to deliver medicines to patients more quickly; more efficiently; and with better designs, safety, and effect. Many of the risks in product design, including scale up can be mitigated by modeling and simulation. Improved product understanding and design space delineation, as well as the possibility for control of complex continuous manufacturing equipment are possible.

These pharmaceutical development oriented simulations need high performance computing resources as well as a variety of software to model everything from molecular dynamics to entire processes trains for the effects on the pharmaceutical product at various scales of scrutiny. The demand curve for these resources has many peaks and can shift in a time scale much faster than a typical procurement process.

Both on demand cloud based computing capability and software as a service models have been growing in use. This presentation describes the efforts of the Enabling Technology Consortium to apply these information technology models to pharmaceutical simulations which have special needs for documentation and security. It is expected that the environment will have more benefits as the cloud can be configured for collaborative work among companies in the non-competitive space and work can be made available for collaboration and use by contract service vendors or health authorities.

The expected benefits of this computing environment include economies of scale for both the providers and the consumer, increased speed, and a higher level of value generation for providers by the use of increased resources and for consumers by the information available to accelerate and improve delivery of pharmaceutical products.