Accenture brews beer in Dublin as Covid test
ACCENTURE, the global consulting giant, says its new digital laboratory in Leopardstown, south county Dublin, is brewing beer to mirror the fermentation process used in biotechnology production as it researches how to make the manufacturing process of pharmaceuticals — such as a vaccine for Covid-19 — more efficient.
Barry Heavey, who is head of life sciences at Accenture, said a team of 80 people at the facility in Co Dublin, which opened last year, are replicating the fermentation process and using a combination of artificial intelligence and data analytics during the process.
He said: “Brewing beer is very analogous to making a pharmaceutical.
“If you are making a batch of beer, you might not know until the end of the process if it tastes very good or if it contains the right level of alcohol.
“Using data, you can find out during the process if your batch of beer is being made to specification.
“That’s the same for pharmaceuticals. Take Covid-19, for example: after they prove that a vaccine works, every time they want to make a batch of it, it could take up to two years and you don’t want to find out at the end that the batch is no good or that it’s not going to be effective,” Heavey said.
“So you want to find out early and then course correct on the process. You can do that if you maximise the use of scientific data and AI and data analytics during the process.
“When you are assembling something on a production line, say in traditional automotive manufacturing, you can inspect everything as it’s moving along a conveyor belt. But when you are making 10,000 litres of something in a massive fermenter, you have no idea if it’s going well or going badly unless you start to use scientific data from the reactor.”
The Leopardstown team is made up of people from Accenture and from two companies it bought, Cork-based Enterprise System Partners, which develops technology that digitally tracks and documents the bio-pharmaceutical production process, and American data analytics firm LabAnswer, since renamed Accenture Scientific Informatics Services.