Implementation of a secure genome sequence search platform on public cloud-leveraging open source solutions

With looming patent cliffs, resulting in no patent protections for several block buster drugs, several Life sciences organizations are looking at ways to reduce the costs of drug discovery. They are looking to change business models from having all drug discovery activities being done in-house to a more economical collaborative innovation model by forming ecosystems through consortiums and alliances with several other partners to collaborate especially in the pre-competitive areas of drug discovery. They are considering leveraging cloud computing platforms to create the collaborative drug discovery platforms needed to support these new drug discovery models. Another area of focus is to improve the success rate of drug discovery by creating more complex computer models and performing more data intensive simulations. Next generation sequence sequencers are also providing unprecedented amounts of data to work with. Cloud computing has proven to be scalable and capable of meeting the computation needs in life sciences domain but a key inhibitor has been security concerns. This paper is an extension of an earlier paper we had written that describes how to leverage a public cloud to build a scalable genome sequence search platform to enable secure collaboration among multiple partners. This paper describes a few additional techniques and open source solutions that can be leveraged to address security concerns while leveraging public cloud platforms for collaborative drug discovery activities.