VPAC launches advanced bioresearch platform

The Minister for Innovation, John Brumby, who presided at the event, officially unveiled the facility, which is designed to enable research organisations to "access leading drug discovery and bioinformatics tools and run them on the state of the art VPAC High Performance Computing system".

The open collaboration facility is claimed to accelerate the processes of research, condensing four weeks of "compute time" into approximately three days of work using the software applications on the BioPlatform, the company said.

VPAC states that the tools include "commercial proprietary and open source packages" and also comprise the "IBM Discovery Link Solutions, the LION bioscience suite, Schrödinger software and the Tripos Discovery Suite".

The company said the platform is "easily and cost effectively accessible to small to medium research organisations and academic groups across Australia", and claim the BioPlatform may save Australian researchers "in excess of AU$250,000 in direct R&D costs per year".