Large pharmaceutical company uses D360 data informatics technology to advance its neurological discovery program
D360 provides data access in real time enabling scientists to make informed decisions.
Background
Preclinical research at a large-size pharmaceutical company strives to discover novel agents to modulate disease states by restoration of or enhancing target functions in neurological disease. With a heavy focus on understanding human biology and high-dimensional genetic data, the company relies on collaborative cutting-edge technology platforms that integrate structural biology, chemical biology, computational chemistry, novel assay development, and compound screening automation to translate findings to benefits for patients. Thus, being able to analyze large volumes of data from multiple internal databases and registries as well as from external collaborators (academic labs and consortia) in real time is essential for the company’s drug discovery process. Multi-disciplinary teams need to communicate updates quickly to leadership so that go/no-go decisions on agents can be made and agents with the highest likelihood of success can move on to the next stage of drug development. The company had an older data analysis platform in place since 2006, but in 2017 found that this platform could not keep up with current demands for collaboration and the needs of discovery scientists.
Challenge
The existing data analysis platform led to multi-disciplinary team communication breakdown for several reasons: 1) The data informatics team was overwhelmed with the number of query development requests from chemists and scientists. 2) The existing platform was not user friendly and made it difficult for all team members to load, review, and analyze data from multiple sources. 3) There was a substantial time delay in obtaining access to data and the majority of team members were reluctant to use the platform. This created a larger problem of not having all data available in the platform because users would not load their data. Thus, the company wanted to provide timely data access to chemists, other scientists, leadership, and data analysts in a collaborative, user-friendly self-service platform.
Solution
In 2017, the company decided to switch their data analysis platform to D360 because the inefficiencies of the current solution and the company was still driven to identify novel neurological therapies through innovative R&D technology. D360 supports the entire data workflow including intuitive data access, interactive data filtering, exploration, and numerous visualizations for built-in design, analysis, and calculation of key parameters for potential drug candidates. This shift to D360 allows the individual team members to focus their scientific expertise on understanding data versus assembling data sets. There has been 100% success in use and adoption of D360, and the platform is now viewed as a critical part of the company’s process for data analysis and informed decision making.
D360 was a critical change to the discovery workflow from the previous platform in that data visualization and integration of data sources has made D360 a useful tool for both chemists and other scientists to share data as well as focus on more important aspects, such as data quality and integrity. A major change with D360 has been that the scientists can set up the queries themselves, thus they can now focus on the science and not data management. This also relieves the burden on the data informatics/IT team. Overall, the solution has provided greater collaboration on research project decisions through shared insights and real-time review of all the data.
Benefit
D360 has made a significant impact on advancing discovery needs for developing novel neurological therapies at the company and has been able to scale as the needs of scientists change. D360 has greatly reduced project risk and the time for pivoting and decision making. Real-time access and updates to data allows the multi-disciplinary teams and leadership to make decisions with a full view of all information; they no longer have to contemplate whether data is missing or incorrect. Analysis of data in the D360 platform is the “single source of truth” because everyone at the company is committed to loading, reviewing, and analyzing their data in this platform. This cutting-edge scientific informatics platform supports effective, efficient, collaborative decision making based on the science and allows for scientists to explore their own questions without additional burden on IT.
