Life sciences: Increasing speed-to-insight in pharma

Insight engines help find promising compounds

Farther upstream in the development process, researchers seek out compounds that may have the potential to solve medical problems, and try to locate the individuals who are carrying out the early studies on them. Insight engines are on the front line of this endeavor, given their use in discerning a company’s own research history as well as finding and analyzing large and disparate repositories outside an enterprise. “Our Insight Platform not only finds specific information for searchers but enhances the intelligence of an R&D organization,” said Scott Parker, director of product marketing at Sinequa. “It enriches existing terms with additional metadata and finds relevant patterns in the data.”

Ingesting content from a variety of data sources enables the Sinequa Insight Platform to identify businesses and other entities associated with the molecule, drug, disease, or clinical trials of interest. “A network of experts, for example, can be identified both inside and outside the organization,” observed Parker, “and used as a resource for R&D initiatives.” In particular, given the frequency of acquisitions and mergers in the pharmaceutical industry, being able to search across different siloed systems is very beneficial in surfacing ongoing activities by different groups who may not be aware of each other’s work.

The promise of big data

An intriguing trend in life sciences research is cited by Deloitte involving tech giants such as Google and Amazon. Since one-third of the world’s data is healthcare-related, and these companies specialize in data analysis on a big data scale, it is not surprising that they are becoming involved. Their activities include a range of initiatives from funding other companies involved in life sciences and healthcare to mining data in medical records using machine learning. In the future, such ventures and partnerships could have a significant effect on R&D funding in these fields, given the resources that these tech giants have available.