Compaq, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems want to deliver the hardware and software necessary to create faster, cheaper processes for developing prescription drugs, the vendors said at last week's BioSilico 2002 life-sciences conference.

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries face several IT challenges, including data integration, computational throughput, security, and knowledge management, says Vijay Pillai, director of Oracle Life Sciences' software development group.

The vendors aim to address these hurdles by delivering processing power, storage capabilities, software-integration tools, and faster networks--and in some cases, working together to help the drugmakers. For example, Oracle teams with hardware vendors such as IBM and Compaq to deliver database and database-integration software to biotechnology clients, such as Genetec Inc.

With "in silico" research, the computer becomes the laboratory, says Bill Blake, Compaq's VP of high-performance technical computing. The automotive and aerospace industries have been using mathema-tical models for years to study vehicle performance. "Life-sciences industries like biotechnology and pharmaceuticals are now turning their attention to the hardware, software, and networking capacity necessary to reduce the latency of data availability," he says.

Kyowa Pharmaceutical Inc., the Princeton, N.J., arm of $3.5 billion Japanese health-care product maker Kyowa Hakko Co., depends upon access to integrated databases to facilitate the flow of information throughout its clinical trials. "You can't rely simply on just your own internal databases anymore," says Yutaka Waki, Kyowa's VP of global planning.

Drugmakers must have access to various databases from different biotechnology companies to ensure they make informed decisions, Waki says. "IBM, Compaq, and others understand this, and they're beginning to offer knowledge-management software with their hardware to help the process," he says.

IBM Life Sciences' DiscoveryLink software, for example, connects information from distributed databases and makes the data available to biotechnology researchers via a Web-based portal, says Srini Chari, IBM Life Sciences' senior manager of solution architecture and strategy. Much of IBM Life Sciences' thrust will be in data and knowledge management so that drug companies don't have to make decisions based on incomplete data.