AbbVie Meets the Future with a Proud History of Innovation

With an R&D staff of 8,800 worldwide, over 60 active development programs, a global reach and a history of innovative products, AbbVie has good reason to be proud. In 2017, AbbVie’s clinical trials included 137,000 patients, which demonstrates a breadth and depth of research that few organizations can rival.

But, just as every silver lining has a touch of gray, the massive volume of data AbbVie uses and produces every day to succeed in its innovations has presented its own share of obstacles for the company. A recent report by IDC sheds light on these challenges and also provides insight into the next-generation technology AbbVie employed to overcome them.

Challenge Overview

Abbvie had a large quantity of valuable data that was not reaching the people who needed it for their research. Data silos, coupled with time-consuming information aggregation across working groups, slowed time to insight and hindered the company’s ability to make informed, collaborative decisions. In addition, AbbVie also needed the ability to more quickly ingest data feeds, documents and data sets from outside the organization. No single technology was able to meet the company’s many requirements for an agile, efficient enterprise data platform. With its previous technology solutions, finding answers to research questions could require days or even weeks.

Solution Requirements

While AbbVie had a long-term goal of creating a solution that can improve operations across the organization, they focused the initial evaluation and project on its discovery research organization—the global teams developing and testing new compounds that will become the medicines of tomorrow. AbbVie’s main requirements align closely with those of other industry leaders who are looking to modernize and extract more value from their data. They sought the ability to:

• Scale as new and diverse data sources come in
• Prep for future innovation via an extensible platform
• Quickly demonstrate value to stakeholders
• Rapidly harmonize data upon ingestion
• Ensure granular, roles-based security
• Comply with regulatory requirements

After evaluation of 10 technology solutions, AbbVie implemented an operational data hub (ODH) built on MarkLogic®.

According to the IDC report, “An initial database review identified 10 viable commercial platform options. Based on key requirements and other operational factors, including rapid data ingest and the ability to harmonize data on the fly, AbbVie selected the MarkLogic platform as the foundation for its enterprise data platform.”¹

Success in Six Months

With large-scale change requiring both comprehension and buy-in across the organization—not to mention a significant budget—the ability to demonstrate value in the pilot project was of critical importance. In six months, the MarkLogic team was able to successfully demonstrate the core strengths of ODH technology in meeting the requirements of AbbVie’s researchers and scientists.

Today, AbbVie uses MarkLogic to store, integrate and link R&D drug information from across five data repositories onto one searchable platform. And there are more initiatives on the horizon.

MarkLogic for Pharma

Enabling up to 10X faster application development, a complete view of data, intelligent search, improved data governance and government-grade security, MarkLogic’s ODH provides an efficient, agile approach to pharmaceutical data management. It also facilitates a more accurate and transparent view of every stage of the drug lifecycle, eliminating fragmentation of data while enabling new business models and increased operational efficiency.

MarkLogic is built with a flexible data model to ingest, manage and search multi-structured information without sacrificing the data resiliency and consistency features of relational databases. With these capabilities and features such as semantics and smart mastering, MarkLogic enables pharmas such as AbbVie, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson and others to more quickly gain actionable insight from data for faster time to market.

Learn More

• Get the IDC Customer Spotlight, Creating an Extensible Data Platform at a Leading U.S. Biopharmaceutical Company
• Read about the Operational Data Hub for Pharma
• Learn how MarkLogic helps pharmas accelerate drug discovery and development

¹ IDC Customer Spotlight, sponsored by MarkLogic, Creating an Extensible Data Platform at a Leading U.S. Biopharmaceutical Company, March 2019