Data consolidation speeds up drug search

In pharmaceutical R&D, data is generated from several sources: the process, patients, retailers, and caregivers, among others. Pharmaceutical R&D organizations that use the traditional way of creating APRs manually consolidate paper specifications into binders across all R&D functions. Specific regional rules, compliance mandates, and external regulations were slowing down the client’s workflow. The many spreadsheets in multiple formats were leading to errors from manual entry and duplication of data — the inevitable “swivel effect” that results from data being pulled out from disparate, unconnected software packages. Iris was approached to improve the process of collecting and using data from multiple sources; the improvement would help the client identify and develop new potential drug candidates faster.

Iris’s team of 12 specialists designed, developed, tested, and deployed a cloud-based application that integrates data from multiple regions and eight different systems into a single, unified interface for the client’s users. Our application unified the creation and management of the client’s workflows across its lines of business and 20 different product families. The development environment included Amazon’s AWS OPCx; Webmethods; natural language processing (NLP); neural networks; and Python programming.

Within a year of the application’s release, 2,800 users were using the application, with 55% of APRs turning around in 10 calendar weeks or less. Thanks to the in-memory data grid, the response time of transactions across the board has been brought down to nearly 2 seconds. The cloud-based application developed by Iris ensures that data is automatically and seamlessly shared between systems that were previously stand-alone and required the tedious manual entry of data.