By Enric Domingo Domènech (ERNI Spain) and Aitor Mars Pérez (ERNI Spain)
The customer is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, dedicated to researching ways to improve health through high tech and innovation.
The challenge
Researching and developing a new drug is a long journey that can take up to 15 years from discovery to an approved medication. Moreover, it requires significant investment, and only a few will succeed. In addition, manufacturing these medicines involves a complex and highly controlled set of processes where machines and pharma operators work together through different interfaces and software. While coming up with a novel drug and getting it approved is challenging, scaling up its production to meet the needs of the global health market (while ensuring its high level of quality) is not a trivial step.
The customer previously had their data distributed across multiple data silos. Each data silo was controlled by one department or business unit, isolated from the rest of the organisation. So, accessing the data or collaborating between departments was an arduous journey.
Moreover, more than one department could use the same data source, so each team had to develop and maintain its own pipeline. This meant spending more resources.
The solution
First, the company needed to collect, manipulate and analyse massive amounts of data, including, among other things, R&D processes and patient data. Using big data technologies, ERNI broke the data silos and created a data platform where scientists have clean, reliable, consistent and linked data to speed up new drug R&D. Moreover, thanks to having a centralised data platform, the departments can now collaborate among themselves. Therefore, the R&D time has been reduced.
Second, the proper integration of artificial intelligence models into their data pipelines has increased their research outcomes and at the same time improved manufacturing efficiency and scalability.
ERNI has provided development services and support across different company branches, from research to production, leveraging their previous procedures and systems to a new data-centric model where decisions can be made based on accurate data insights. Furthermore, ERNI has contributed to the customer’s cloud adoption for data storage and computing resources while ensuring security and compliance with pharma regulations.