GridGain Systems, provider of enterprise-grade In-Memory Data Fabric solutions based on Apache® Ignite™, announced that e-Therapeutics plc (LSE ETX), a U.K.-based drug discovery and development group, is using the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric to run hundreds of thousands of computational analyses in minutes.
Founded in 2003, e-Therapeutics is focused on finding treatments for biocomplex diseases, such as cancer and neurodegeneration. The company currently has two drug candidates undergoing clinical trials, and its multiple discovery programs include a focus on cancer immunotherapy and treating resistance to modern “targeted” cancer therapies. The company’s approach is based on computational analysis of disease cells. While performing a single analysis is relatively straightforward and does not take a lot of time, the e-Therapeutics approach involves hundreds of thousands of analyses across multiple parameter sets and assumptions, resulting in an extraordinarily compute-intensive environment.
GridGain has allowed us to complete in just a few hours or even minutes analysis projects that used to take weeks,” said Jonny Wray, PhD, Head of Discovery Informatics at e-Therapeutics. “Just as important, we’ve been able to launch initiatives that were simply computationally infeasible before. We’ve been able to build far larger and more complex models of cells, which has opened up fundamentally new approaches to tackling diseases. And our scientists can more quickly explore many more hypotheses.”
The GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric, based on Apache® Ignite™, enables high-performance transactions that run 1,000x faster than disk-based approaches. It provides high speed transactions, real-time streaming and fast analytics in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer. The solution powers existing and new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware, which can be easily scaled by adding more nodes to the compute grid.
e-Therapeutics used GridGain to parallelize its Network Pharmacology platform across 20 nodes on one 20-core commodity server and has since grown the platform to 100 nodes on five servers. The platform delivers approximately an 80x speed increase over the non-parallelized environment. The company also developed a simple, web-based interface that connects to an internally developed micro-service using the GridGain API, so scientists can now run analyses without having to work from a command line or having to consult with a computational informatics specialist.
In addition to simplicity and ease-of-use, GridGain allows multiple biologists to work on multiple projects at the same time. “Over the last year and a half, we have been able to run 10 concurrent discovery projects, and we have moved a number of these discoveries into testing,” added Wray. “We could not have achieved this pace without GridGain.”
Like many of our customers, e-Therapeutics is using the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric to solve its toughest data processing challenges and achieve unprecedented speed,” said Abe Kleinfeld, President and CEO of GridGain. “It is always rewarding to see our technology being used to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges, such as the treatment of biocomplex diseases.”
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