BT Group plc and Schrodinger Inc. announced that the two companies are now working together to accelerate the process of drug discovery and development using the BT for Life Sciences cloud platform and Schrodinger's powerful scientific software applications. As part of the joint initiative, Schrodinger becomes a Strategic Member of the BT for Life Sciences partner ecosystem, helping provide research solutions to scientists on a global basis. Schrodinger's software tools will be integrated into BT for Life Sciences as part of BT's R&D Workbench environment. Built on the BT Cloud Compute platform and unveiled at the 10(th) Annual BioIT World meeting last year, BT for Life Sciences is the first cloud service designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased productivity in discovery, research and development. One of Schrodinger's key applications, hosted Seurat, will soon be available on the BT Cloud Compute Platform. This application contains tools that help researchers in the discovery and optimization of drug research and provides a means for sharing real-time analysis across the organization. Using the BT platform, Schrodinger can easily integrate data and scientific business processes, enhancing the early discovery process so that ultimately better compounds can be brought to the clinic faster. Because BT for Life Sciences was developed as a secure and segregated platform for scientists, it will enable Schrodinger to work with major pharmaceutical companies and other biotech organizations that need faster and more innovative approaches to drug discovery and development. In the past, researchers would typically provide the IT department with the requirements for each in silico experiment, which could mean a delay in research and discovery as the equipment was purchased and the platform built. Using BT's cloud services for Life Sciences, Schrodinger can now offer their applications quickly and easily with a click-to-launch approach that uses secure, compliant, and scalable cloud computing, storage and databanks, in order to process demanding scientific analysis.