Accenture launched what it calls an "open partner ecosystem" to help independent software vendors support its drug discovery platform.
In September, Accenture and Merck unveiled plans to build an informatics research platform on Amazon's cloud computing service Amazon Web Services. The platform, which Accenture and Merck are still developing, provides pharmaceutical, biotechnology and scientific institutions with access to research data from various applications, available through a single set of interfaces.
Through the platform, Accenture said participating organizations would be able to aggregate and analyze research data to support the early stages of drug development.
With the open partner ecosystem, independent software vendors will now be able to integrate their technologies into the cloud-based platform. Participating life sciences companies will then be able to access these resources — such as biological assay data capture, genomics data analysis and image storage capabilities — to accelerate their drug development efforts.
More than 30 software vendors and organizations have joined the open partner ecosystem to date, Accenture said in a news release Nov. 26.