GlaxoSmithKline R&D creates data platform using Hadoop for the internal sharing of scientific data

Pharmaceuticals firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has improved its research and development (R&D) capabilities through a programme to enable the sharing of data generated through the development of medicines across the R&D department.

In 2015, GSK embarked on a data strategy to address the challenge it faced in sharing data. There are around 10,000 scientists in GSK’s R&D operation, but very little data on medicine development and trials was shared between them.

Before the data strategy, which is now three years old, all data from medicine trials and experiments was in different formats and stored in different places, said Mark Ramsey, who was brought in as chief data officer for GSK’s R&D operation in 2015.

He said some work had been done on traditional data warehousing in the past, with attempts to structure and organise data using technologies such as Oracle and Teradata. “But what we were really looking for was something to tackle the problem on a broader scale,” said Ramsey.

“Pharmaceutical companies produce a large amount of data, but it is produced in vertical silos,” he said. “For example, in discovery there is experimental data produced which is used to progress individual new medicines, but there wasn’t really an ability to share that information across the R&D organisation and to use the power of the aggregation of that information to make better decisions.”

GSK recognised this was a constraint, so recruited Ramsey as a chief data officer to define a data strategy across the R&D operation so information could be used as a strategic asset rather than just for operations.

He started by identifying where the department was in terms of data use. “I initially did a survey across the entire R&D population of about 10,000 scientists using Competing with Data from MIT, which measures data maturity, and got a very high response rate,” he said.

“In general, the feedback confirmed the hypothesis that people could access the data they created themselves but could not really share.”

He followed this with an assessment of what had been done in the past, in terms of creating an integrated information platform, and found there had really not been a focused effort in R&D to share data and that the technology required to facilitate sharing was not in place.

When the organisation is developing medicines, scientists do experiments. So you have thousands of scientists carrying out experiments as they try to determine if it is a success or not. But at GSK, they were all doing these experiments based on individual programmes. “There is value in putting all those experiments together,” said Ramsey.

“Before they start an experiment, they can analyse all the similar experiments already done and get insight from them. The worst-case scenario is somebody doing an experiment that has already been done,” he said.

The organisation also carries out lots of clinical trials. These are done with certain focused results the scientists are trying to achieve – they will either achieve them or not. “But if you don’t put all the clinical trials together, you lose the value of that aggregated knowledge.”