The pharmaceutical industry has wrapped its collective head around big data and is increasingly using it to track customer behavior, link lab data to help research and development and to formulate a pricing structure based on patients’ personal data.
One major use is data mining: handling massive amounts of customer information to detect coherent structures in unstructured texts. One of its prime tasks is to transition from analyzing data in retrospect to using the data in order to predict future outcomes. The pharma industry also uses big data for operational analysis to process data from connected sources such as laboratories.
But the part of the pharmaceutical industry that probably needs big data the most is research and development. According to work by McKinsey, pharmaceutical R&D has been under increasing pressure as success rates have declined and the pipeline of new products has stagnated. McKinsey expects that the predictive modelling of biological processes and drugs will become significantly more sophisticated and widespread going forward.
One step in the direction of both connecting the lab data and potentially using it for research was taken recently by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche when it bought US laboratory big data company Viewics. The acquisition will strengthen Roche’s existing digital capabilities within its diagnostics operations and give it access to Viewics’ cloud-based big data platform for laboratory IT systems.
Viewics was built specifically to solve the challenge of making big data from disparate IT systems in the laboratory usable across the entire health system. The company says it has pioneered a new data extraction architecture that incorporates automation to resolve many of the typical problems laboratory IT staff encounter when using generic business intelligence solutions, traditional data warehousing, and extraction methodologies.
Viewics’ software integrates big data from a variety of laboratory-based IT systems in order to provide insights into areas such as operations and finances.
Roche acquired all the shares of the privately-held company, which was founded in 2010 in Sunnyvale, California, and has a subsidiary in Pune, India.
Roche has been actively pursuing big data solutions for several years now. In 2015, together with the French collaborative laboratory La Paillasse, the company launched the first participatory research program called Epidemium aimed at understanding cancer by using big data to cross diagnostic, prognostic, therapeutic with legal, socio-economic or environmental information available on the Internet. The platform now contains a rich database of scientific publications in oncology, 50,000 data points from clinical studies ranging over 34 types of cancer and 4 billion data points from cancer patients. Another one of its project, Baseline, aims to model the incidence and mortality rate of 34 types of cancer from a number of factors including infectious agents, behavioral and environmental.
In early 2017, Roche bought Austrian digital diabetes management platform mySugr, which has more than 1 million users globally. The Austrian firm’s apps and services offer a combination of diabetes coaching, therapy management, unlimited test-strips and automated data tracking. Also in 2017, the Swiss pharma giant introduced FLOODLIGHT, a smart-phone monitoring system for multiple sclerosis patients and together with Johnson & Johnson joined Apple, Fitbit and Samsung in a US digital health pilot program.
Key takeaways:
- Pharma companies are increasingly using big data to track customer behavior, link
- laboratory data and help boost R&D.
- Roche acquired big data platform Viewics to link laboratory data.
- The acquisition fits in Roche’s long term strategy to integrate big data into daily operations.