Moderna Therapeutics is a biotech company working to create new medicines through its revolutionary messenger RNA (mRNA) Therapeutics platform. It uses Microsoft Office 365 business productivity tools to build an agile, flexible, and collaborative ecosystem of Moderna teams and partners to accelerate innovation in mRNA research and development.

Founded in 2010, Moderna Therapeutics began as a company with a vision: create a new in vivo medicine using messenger RNA (mRNA) to teach human cells to create proteins that target diseased tissue. Placing eighth on the CNBC 2014 Disruptor 50 list, Moderna is poised to deliver a radical treatment modality that’s fast, scalable, and inexpensive.

“The beauty of using mRNA as a drug is the speed at which we can design a new mRNA therapeutic for a targeted protein,” says Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer at Moderna. “By replicating our basic methodology, we can scale quickly to target new diseases. Traditional drug development for pharmaceutical companies takes 10 years or more. And because the mRNA Therapeutic modality teaches the body how to make its own medicine, it’s inherently cost-effective.”

The Race to Save Lives

Fueled by the potential to unlock a new dimension of medical treatment for patients living with serious diseases, everything that happens at Moderna happens at “Moderna speed.” When the company chooses IT solutions, it looks for technology that enables the fast, agile, and collaborative scenarios that drive innovation and contribute to growth. That’s why Moderna uses Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based business productivity tools. “We’re innovating in the biotech space and we need to partner with innovators in the productivity space, which led us to Microsoft,” says Steven Frederick, Head of Enterprise IT at Moderna.

“We chose Office 365 because it supports what our fast-moving company needs to accomplish,” adds John Reynders, Chief Information Officer at Moderna. “We operate in a highly regulated environment and Microsoft has thought through privacy concerns and data security. Office 365 offers the right balance between flexibility and elasticity that allows us to scale quickly and collaborate globally, while giving us control of sensitive data around the world.”

Since it subscribed to Office 365 Enterprise E3 in 2013, Moderna has grown by a factor of four; opened two new facilities; forged partnerships with AstraZeneca and Alexion to develop new medicines in the areas of cardiology, oncology, and rare diseases, and founded its oncology-focused drug development subsidiary, Onkaido Therapeutics. Now it’s easy to add someone to the Moderna ecosystem using Office 365 ProPlus and Click-to-Run installation technology, enabling access to the latest version of Office on up to five PCs, Macs, and mobile devices per employee. “If we didn’t have a cloud-based approach powered by Office 365, we could never have moved this fast,” says Reynders.

Flexible Work Environments Improve Productivity

Everyone at Moderna uses Office 365 to improve their productivity and increase their contribution to the company, no matter where they are working or what device they are using. All employees are “heavy users” of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and they expect to access to their files anytime, anywhere.

“We do heavy-duty simulation and modeling in Excel, and we’d bottom-out the capabilities of other online solutions in less than a day,” says Reynders. “Using Office 365 ProPlus and OneDrive for Business generates mobility and productivity that’s light years ahead of working with Office files that are stuck on your office computer. Instead, we create documents on our laptops, iPads, or smartphones, and store them online so it’s easy to share critical insights. At Moderna, we can’t imagine working any other way.”

Scientists also use Microsoft Office Online for browser-based access to files stored in the cloud so they can edit documents simultaneously. “Office Online puts the flex in flexible!” says Reynders. “You don’t even need your computer. Using a browser, we share PowerPoint presentations, schedule meetings, and update documents. That level of agility helps us to work at Moderna speed.”

Collaboration Drives Innovation, Competitive Advantage

According to Bancel, collaboration is essential for innovation. Because working on the leading edge of science is fraught with unknowns, collaborating with many partners offsets the risk of traveling down the wrong path of inquiry.

“We have to make decisions about our product years before launch, without knowing what the regulatory, manufacturing, or competitive landscape will look like,” says Bancel. “So we are using Microsoft cloud tools to achieve that level of collaboration to optimize our products and beat the odds: In the drug development world, 90 percent of drugs fail.”

Moderna is building an ecosystem of strategic global partnerships using Office 365 to establish highly secure online collaboration with academic and business partners in less than a day. “We use SharePoint Online and integrate with Microsoft Azure to enable multifactor authentication,” says Reynders. “We can capitalize on a business opportunity with a new partner by setting up a secure SharePoint collaboration platform in just a few clicks. That’s not just collaboration, that’s a competitive advantage.”

Reliability Enables the Science

Office 365 functions as a reliable backdrop at Moderna that “enables the science” by allowing people to focus on their work. Scientists in the United States exchange ideas with colleagues in Europe and Asia through instant messages, or by escalating a phone call to an interactive video conference to share desktops and drawings. Instead of wasting time figuring out how to connect with colleagues, Moderna scientists spend their energy on exchanging ideas to come up with innovative new concepts.

”It doesn’t matter what you are doing, if communication and collaboration is not reliable, all the gears grind to a halt,” concludes Reynders. “Since moving to Office 365, we’re not worrying about the technology. Instead, we are focusing on enabling our vision to pioneer a new way to treat serious illness and make a difference in the world.”

Source: Microsoft.com

Managed Solution is the premier provider of IT support services and technology recommendations in the biotechnology and life science industries.

Biotechnology & Life Science Resources

A Biotech Lab in the Cloud, Backed by Peter Thiel

By Jeff Bercovici, San Francisco bureau chief, Inc. as written on Inc.com. The ECT-1. IMAGE:

Hardly a week goes by in Silicon Valley without someone launching a new food-delivery or ride-sharing app. Meanwhile, we're running out of antibiotics that work. What's going on here? Why is new drug development so comparatively torpid when app development is so torrid?

The founders of Emerald Therapeutics, D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza, think it comes down to the difficulty of running experiments in the life sciences. A typical new experiment takes a month to set up -- a month during which a scientist with a decade of education might find herself lugging around jugs of reagent or pipetting. And that's when nothing goes wrong.

"There are these major roadblocks to doing research that all involve the energy you have to sink into the lab itself," said Frezza on Tuesday evening, speaking at the opening of the new Emerald Cloud Laboratory in South San Francisco. The ECL is Frezza and Kleinbaum's solution to the friction they believe is holding back progress in their field.

Dubbed ECL-1, because it's intended to be the first of many, the gleaming warehouse-like space is filled with state-of-the-art instruments for DNA sequencing, gas chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance and other standard types of experiments. It's also filled with robots that prep and carry out the trials, with minimal oversight from human operators. Thanks to the high degree of automation, a team of two or three technicians can carry out up to 50 experiments simultaneously. "It's all about each experiment being 'push a button, walk away,'" Kleinbaum said during a tour of the facility.

The protocols themselves are uploaded to ECL's servers remotely by clients. (Hence the "Cloud" part.) Frezza and Kleinbaum liken the arrangement to Amazon Web Services, which triggered an explosion in the number of new internet startups by removing the need to own one's own servers as a barrier to entry.

Running experiments over the cloud is cost-competitive and far more time efficient; in Emerald's old lab, average setup time was a mere 25 minutes. But it's also superior in terms of standardization and reproducibility, with the environment engineered to control for and measure a host of variables, from ambient air temperature to the length of rubber tubing, that often get overlooked. Capturing so much more data this way gives investigators what Kleinbaum calls "full computational closure," and it's a big part of the ECL's value proposition. "If we're asking people to experiment out of place and out of time, it's not enough to just give them an equivalent experience," he says. "We have to give them a richer experience."

If Kleinbaum and Frezza are sensitive to the needs of researchers, it's because it was in that role that they started Emerald Therapeutics in 2010. Attempting to raise funding for their effort to develop a novel therapy for persistent viral infections, the co-founders, who've been best friends since they grew up together in Philadelphia, were on the verge of giving up and heading back to the east coast when Peter Thiel personally persuaded them to stay in town. A few weeks later, his Founders Fund wrote them their first check. They've raised more than $13 million to date.

Work on their viral cure is ongoing but deep in stealth mode. Frezza says it will be perhaps a year before they're ready to talk about it publicly. Meanwhile, in the next 18 months they plan to invest another $7 million in the ECL, more than doubling the number of different experiments it's capable of carrying out.

Source: http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/emerald-therapeutics-peter-thiel.html

Managed Solution is the premier provider of IT support services and technology recommendations in the biotechnology and life science industries.

Biotechnology & Life Science Resources

By Howard Baldwin

It's an adage as old as time (or at least as old as the invention of the personal computer): Technology is destined to cycle constantly between complexity and simplicity.

Remember the hassle of attaching peripherals in the days before USB ports? Remember the anguish of developing applications for competing OS interfaces before HTML? We fixed those problems, and whaddya know, we moved on to others.

"Complexity grows over time," says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. "Systems are built to do one thing, and then they're modified, morphed and bastardized to do things they were never meant to do."

Complexity occurs when technologies overlap one another -- "when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it," agrees Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting.

Even as recently as three years ago, Burger says, "people thought they could do massive replacements of technology" -- say, move everything to SaaS applications in the cloud -- "but now we're seeing way more adding of technology rather than replacing." Just consider how many new collaboration tools the enterprise has embraced without replacing or reducing email.

The result can be a tangle of overlapping, redundant systems that costs money, slows innovation and hinders organizations from identifying new business opportunities.

Sometimes you have to turn something off and see who yells. - Dee Burger, Capgemini Consulting

"I've been in discussions with CIOs who want to replace something, but they can't be sure of what would happen if they did," Burger says. They're reluctant to find out what kind of chaos would ensue. But "sometimes you just have to turn something off and see who yells."

Computerworld spoke with five CIOs who did just that and lived to tell the tale. Read on for their advice on how to tackle complexity and emerge with a more efficient, agile and auditable technology stack.....

READ MORE

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/2956720/it-strategy/how-to-reduce-it-complexity-and-increase-agility.html

One of the easiest ways to learn how you can benefit from the AWS cloud is with hands-on practice. Self-paced labs provide this hands-on training in a live practice environment. AWS subject matter experts have developed more than 60 topics on AWS services, and labs are currently available online through APN Technology Partner Cloud vLAB’s qwikLABS.com platform. To help you navigate through topics and solve common use cases using related AWS services, they also offer several learning paths, or qwikLABS “quests.” Here are some of the paths available.

AWS Service Area or Use Case

You can learn how to work with related AWS services with quests by Service Area or Use Case. The following are available in beginner and advanced paths:

• By Service Area: Compute & Networking, Deployment & Management, and Storage & CDN.

• By Use Case: Websites & Web Apps, Big Data on AWS, and Digital Media.

You will earn a badge each time you complete a quest.

AWS for Microsoft Windows

AWS offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database and systems management options that are optimized for Microsoft Windows-based workloads. Learn how to work with Microsoft technologies running in the AWS cloud, including:

• Corporate Apps on AWS for Windows, such as Exchange and SharePoint.

• Databases on AWS for Windows, like Microsoft SQL Server and Amazon RDS for SQL.

• SysAdmin on AWS for Windows, including services to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows-based environment in the AWS cloud.

Here are the badges that you can earn by completing these quests:

Learn more.

With the digital media landscape in upheaval, NBC News takes nothing for granted. Early to mobile apps, it continually seeks the Next Big Thing with which to create “special experiences” for consumers. Its latest find: Notification Hubs in Windows Azure, with which it cost-effectively pushes millions of breaking-news notifications within minutes. Consumers love the app (4.5 out of 5 stars), and NBC shaved months off time-to-market.

Business Needs

“The market for digital news is ferocious.”

Andrew Locke doesn’t mince words. Locke, Vice President of Mobile and Devices for NBC News, deals with that ferocity on a daily basis, from competitors including other traditional media organizations (TV and print) that have moved to the web, news organizations existing solely as websites, and app-only competitors.

NBC News has done well in this increasingly competitive market because of its unique assets, according to Locke, which include strong broadcast and cablecast brands; properties such as Today, Meet the Press, and NBC Nightly News; and a spectrum of expertise (rather than a single focus on, say, politics).

The company was early to the mobile market, producing phone apps starting in 2008. Its strategy includes “being on every platform that has meaningful traction with our audience,” Locke says. The strategy also includes a very specific target audience: “dedicated news consumers, especially big fans of our existing brands,” says Locke. Casual news consumers will get to the NBC News website on their own, often through social media. But for its core audience, NBC News wants to create what Locke calls “a special experience based on the best features that each platform has to offer to our news fans.”

NBC News wants to get its apps, with their “special experiences,” on as many types of devices as possible. It saw cloud computing as an important way to do this, because back-end functionality could be created once, and exposed to all compatible devices connecting to the cloud.

But the company didn’t, as yet, have its apps in the cloud.

Solution

NBC News already had apps for Windows Phone 7, but the releases of the Windows 8 operating system and Windows Phone 8, in addition to the availability of Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud-computing platform, presented the company with new opportunities to deliver a “special experience” to its core audience.

One of those opportunities was a new way to push notifications. Push notifications are a traditional, even vital, part of mobile apps, and NBC News already used them. But NBC wanted the fastest push notifications possible, to deliver breaking news ahead of the competition. It wanted a cross-platform solution that would eliminate the need to write time-consuming code, and to repeat that task for each mobile platform. It wanted a solution that could manage itself and scale to millions of users without incurring high latency. It wanted all this at a practical cost. What it wanted was Windows Azure Notification Hubs.

The company first considered running a push notification system on Amazon Web Services but balked at the complicated workflow that would have been required, according to Adam Wyss, Senior Software Engineer at NBC News. Instead, Wyss and his colleagues used Windows Azure Notification Hubs. With the development work they needed already available in Notification Hubs and the Windows Azure worker role, the NBC News team established its notification capability and pushed out client software in two days.

On the client side, NBC News uses toast notifications and plans to adopt Windows Phone Live Tiles, which will display notifications of news stories in near real time. The notifications will appear directly on the start screen, where they can have more screen real estate than a toast notification, without being intrusive.

The company also uses Windows Azure to process NBC News-specific lock screens that users can choose for their mobile devices. And it adopted Windows Phone voice integration to give users another way to navigate easily through the app.

Benefits

NBC News used Windows Azure and Windows Phone to create a highly compelling app, bring it to market quickly, and use its notification technology across all major platforms.

Creates “Special Experience” for Core Audience

NBC News succeeded in its goal to create another “special experience” for its core audience.

“We want breaking news alerts to reach our millions of users as fast as possible,” says Locke. “That’s why we use Windows Azure. We want a strong, highly rated NBC News app to be the leading choice for digital news.”

Users apparently agree that the NBC News app is a success. It’s rated 4.5 stars out of 5.

Speeds Time-to-Market from Months to Days

By choosing Windows-based technologies, NBC News gained the streamlined development experience it wanted. Wyss estimates that if his team had written a highly automated notification system itself, the process would have taken months, instead of just two days.

“Windows Azure gives us a fast, easy development environment,” says Wyss. “Turnaround through Windows Azure is faster than we could achieve inside our existing infrastructure. That’s more cost effective, of course, but the even greater benefit is faster time-to-market. None of our competitors are standing still, and our ability to shave months off time-to-market is an important competitive advantage.”

Provides Support Across Operating Systems

NBC News developers saved even more time, while expanding the reach of the notification technology, by taking advantage of its cross-platform support. A single Notification Hub can support both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 without additional coding—in addition to support for iOS and Android.

“We were extremely productive by using the Windows Azure Notification Hubs,” says Wyss. “There was only one hub to create, and now we have only one hub to maintain for all these platforms. Our choice of Windows Azure is proving very successful.”

The AWS Webinar Series is a selection of live online presentations that cover a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These webinars feature technical sessions led by AWS solutions architects and engineers, live demonstrations, customer examples and Q&A with AWS experts.

Whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced user, you will find a number of sessions that can help you learn about our products, solutions and best practices.

The sessions below are categorized into three levels: Overview*, Essentials* and Advanced*. You can click on the "learn more" drop down arrow to view the detailed description of each session.

Overview: No domain or topic knowledge needed

Essentials: Domain knowledge required, topic knowledge not required

Advanced: Domain and topic knowledge required

Learn best practices of the following services:

• Build serverless backends with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway

• Save Up to 90% on your Amazon EC2 Bill with Spot Instances

• Deep dive on new and existing Amazon S3 features

• Get insights for exporting and querying your mobile app usage with Amazon Mobile Analytics

• Run containerized batch jobs with Amazon EC2 Container Service

• Use AWS services to reduce the impact of DDoS attacks

AGENDA & REGISTRATION

Office Mobile apps for ‪#‎Windows10‬ are here! Created to work in the cloud and on-the-go, now you can enjoy the Office you love from anywhere. Learn more: http://off365.ms/hW4CXw

Molly Wardell, COO Wardell Builders, explains why they choose Managed Solution as their trusted technology partner in this customer testimonial. See more testimonials here: https://managedsolut.wpengine.com/testimonials/.

Wardell Builders is a team made up of dedicated professionals who all know the importance of creating value in a home. They have been building custom homes for decades and have been recognized for their attention to detail, quality results, clear communication and on-track progress. Wardell has won a range of both national and local awards from the National Custom Home Builder Award to the BIA Award for Customer Satisfaction.