Induquímica Laboratorios
Streamlining the Business of Science
Screenshot of an application developed using Mathematica to solve a production problem involving heat transfer.
The company’s IT strategy is advancing along two fronts: removing obstacles to the success of its existing manufacturing business and laying a solid foundation for the highly compute-intensive forensic and research activities that represent attractive new growth opportunities for the company.
“The Mac-based IT infrastructure we put in place for the business side of our operation will scale seamlessly to give us all the computing power we need for DNA sequencing,” Quintanilla says. “And this is the point at which the two prongs of our strategy converge. We believe the computational capacity to sequence DNA will make our pharmaceutical manufacturing operation even more competitive at the same time it enables us to pursue our new strategic initiatives.”
“The Mac-based IT infrastructure we put in place for the business side of our operation will scale seamlessly to give us all the computing power we need for DNA sequencing.”
On the manufacturing side, the ability to sequence DNA will give Induquímica the ability to identify viruses and bacteria that can find their way into drugs during the manufacturing process. “That opens the door for us to add more hard-to-produce pharmaceuticals to our line while maintaining the highest standards of quality,” Quintanilla explains. “But ultimately, we want to move into drug discovery, where the rewards for success are very high.”
The Future
Quintanilla believes that the future of medicine will include tailor-made pharmaceuticals that are specific to each person’s genetic makeup. “We’ll depend on genetic sequencing to find out what kinds of genes affect the individual’s response to the disease and to various pharmacological options,” he says. “Of course, that’ll require us to build and maintain our own supercomputing facility. We’ve been carefully watching what others have been doing in this area. The Xserve supercomputing clusters built at Virginia Tech and elsewhere have demonstrated the price-performance advantages of the Mac architecture, and by all accounts, the Mac-based clusters are much easier to install, configure, and maintain than alternative architectures. Those are critical success factors for us.”
In Induquímica’s labs and offices and on the production floor, Mac technology has already dramatically improved the performance and reliability of the company’s computing infrastructure. The virtually linear scalability of Xserve and the built-in distributed processing capability of Xgrid will ensure that the company can expand that capability on demand, quickly and cost-effectively, to support the company’s ultimate goal — the discovery of the biotech drugs of the future.
