Microsoft's Biomedical Family Is Growing

Microsoft's biomedical family is growing with the addition of yet another member. Back in the first half of 2006, the Redmond company announced the debut of a new partnership with top members of the Life Science industry such as Accelrys Software, Affymetrix, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Applied Biosystems and The Scripps Research Institute. With the formation of the BioIT Alliance, Microsoft aimed to provide a bridge designed to unite the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries. The end purpose of the alliance is to increase the pace of drug research and development. The latest addition to the BioIT Alliance is Progeniq, a Singapore based company specialized in reconfigurable computing programs.

"The life sciences offer one of the best opportunities for information technology to accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development," said Rudy Potenzone, Bio IT Alliance Manager at Microsoft. "Progeniq's collaboration in the Alliance will be a tremendous boost in Bioinformatics data-processing and discoveries in the life science industry."

"Progeniq is delighted to collaborate with Microsoft and Life Science companies in the Bio IT Alliance," said Darran Nathan, Progeniq's Chief Executive Officer. "We are confident that more users will benefit from the speedups from the BioBoost, and more in the life science industry can enjoy its benefits."

While attempting to link science and technology, the BioIT Alliance's first initiatives were focused on data-capture and data-integration associated with the biomedical industry. This is one aspect where Progeniq comes into play with its BioBoost Accelerated suite for Bioinformatics. BioBoost will enable researchers to enjoy hardware accelerated processing for such programs as NCBI BLAST, Smith Waterman, HMMer and ClustalW. In this manner Progeniq reduces the time and amount of resources necessary for computationally intensive Bioinformatics programs to perform their work. Progeniq revealed that the CPU is able to take advantage of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology in order to tailorfit itself on the needs of the application requiring acceleration.