Biotech Firm Turns To IT To Aid Life-Saving ResearchBiotech Firm Turns To IT To Aid Life-Saving Research

Caprion Pharmaceuticals Inc. is accelerating its work studying the nature and function of proteins, as it races against competitors such as Celera Genomics Corp. to provide data that drug companies can use to fight disease. The Montreal biotechnology company, which has raised more than $37.5 million since January for its new bioinformatics division, has signed a deal with CGI Group Inc. to help it create the IT infrastructure it needs to support its research.

"We'll look at tens of millions of proteins over the next few years. These have to be studied and cataloged so that drug company researchers have a database for identifying proteins and checking for mutations," says Paul Kearney, Caprion's director of bioinformatics. With such large volumes of information being generated, Caprion needs a high-throughput IT environment that can process hundreds of terabytes of data each year as the company strives to increase its share of the $1 billion market for proteomics research. Celera has invested more than $50 million in Compaq AlphaServer hardware and services since 1998, including hundreds of servers and workstations and a 70-to 80-terabyte database, to spur its research in this market, which is projected to grow to $6 billion by 2005.

Systems integrator CGI will implement the Oracle8i database to manage data accumulated by Caprion's bioinformatics team. The platform will run on Sun Fire servers with UltraSparc III processors as well as a Sun StorEdge T3 storage array. CGI will integrate Oracle and Sun technology and provide support services over the life of its five-year, $26 million contract with Caprion.

The project's greatest challenge is meeting Caprion's aggressive timeline and demand for computing power, says Muriel McGrath, a CGI account executive. Kearney wants to have everything in place to acquire, store, and back up data by September.

By year's end, Kearney hopes to add data-mining tools, as well as interfaces that biologists and other scientists can use to search and retrieve data from the system using a minimum of 25 new Sun Ray workstations. The company also hopes to use its research to develop its own diagnostic and therapeutic products.

But moving forward fast is critical for Caprion. "There are about 30,000 to 40,000 human genes that make about 1 to 2 million proteins in the human body," Kearney says. "There are only so many to be discovered, and we want to have ownership of this data."