Industry Vertical: Pharmaceuticals

For pharmaceutical companies to keep ahead of the markets, new drug discoveries are the lifeblood of ensuring long-term success. New products can require investments into the hundreds of millions of dollars and can take years to develop – often requiring leveraging dynamic teams and knowledge from around the globe. The process of new product development is information intensive, with large volumes of technical content being exchanged between teams, the need to keep abreast of the latest in external research developments, and the need to identify if different areas of the organization have done similar research that may aid in reducing new product cycle time. Getting new products to market quickly means every step must be tightly managed and thoroughly documented to ensure a timely result once the new drug is submitted for regulatory approval. Any misstep along the way can mean an incomplete submission, result in an approval delay and erode the development to approval time line, ultimately compromising the revenue potential of the new drug.

Autonomy delivers a broad set of solutions that enable pharmaceutical organizations to better manage and leverage the pan-enterprise content being created internally, as well as monitor and keep abreast of external information sources so that it can be better leveraged into the new product development process. Autonomy's unique Meaning Based Computing (MBC) approach enables the system to understand the ideas and meanings behind the information, therefore gaining a conceptual understanding of the underlying content. Whereas before a researcher would potentially have to type in multiple keywords for a single drug or compound – Autonomy IDOL automatically makes these connections conceptually so only a single term needs to be used to find all related materials – a big help to those dealing with complex technical terms that can have many associations – and an even bigger help when trying to find related materials that may have been developed in other parts of the organization.

In every country, pharmaceuticals are a tightly regulated business and must follow stringent guidelines for documenting drug development, testing, and gathering incident information for drugs active in the market. To keep in compliance and adhere to these regulated guidelines, organizations must actively monitor the current status of their products, ensure any data related to particular interactions or adverse effects are well documented and tracked.

Managing and monitoring this information across a global organization is a complex task, crossing data stored in hundreds of different repositories, including document management systems, SharePoint, voice systems, and email stores. Additionally, due to the high potential for litigation or investigation, materials must be identified and retained for long periods of time, locked down when necessary and collected in the case of a response.

For this very need, not only do the 9 top pharmaceutical companies leverage Autonomy's solutions, but 9 of the top 10 largest financial institutions in the world do also. Autonomy delivers the ability for these organizations to massively archive, manage, and index large volumes of content, daily, to keep the organization on top of its vast information stores. Autonomy enables organizations to Manage-In-Place their content. This allows them to proactively monitor and quickly locate clusters of related content, find their relationships, apply information policies, lock down and manage the information lifecycle – all without having to move any content between systems. This approach provides a more flexible environment that enables knowledge sharing to continue on existing content from where it belongs within its host system. With active monitoring, organizations can be alerted of potential issues. For example, if an email containing reference to an ‘off label' usage of the product in the sales channel is discovered – once alerted, organizations can act swiftly to ensure they minimize any potential liability.

The development of pharmaceuticals is inherently a risk-laden business and the need to thoroughly document the development process, extensive testing, and review are critical to ensure the development of safe drugs. Even with the greatest of precautions taken, the potential for investigations and lawsuits is a very real component of the day-to-day operations of the business. The need to retain drug technical content, email, clinical trials data and incident documentation are all components that are subject to the litigation and investigation process. In today's organization, information can be spread across many disparate repositories, local hard drives and other systems that make it challenging to identify and collect content in an efficient and timely manner. And, with the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, organizations are faced with mounting pressure to respond in a timely manner forcing them to make decisions with too often an incomplete picture of their case.

Autonomy has emerged as the leader for enabling organizations to streamline and simplify the challenges they face with pending litigation or investigations. By enabling companies to be better prepared through proactive management of their content, identifying content, applying policy, monitoring for potential issues, and placing holds where necessary and providing the tools to respond to pending litigations or investigations, Autonomy fills a gap that all too often creates a costly situation for many companies. When faced with litigation or investigation, pharmaceutical firms using Autonomy's solutions can quickly identify custodians and related content, and share and review the content with outside counsel to conduct early case assessment to determine the merit of the case and provide an early start to developing a case strategy. This up-front capability greatly simplifies the downstream eDiscovery/eDisclosure process and provides an environment where content can be collected and reviewed by outside counsel without ever having to be transferred physically.

Bristol-Myers Squibb turned to Autonomy IDOL to address the challenges of its Pharmaceutical Research Institute and its Worldwide Medicines Group. Autonomy IDOL is used extensively by product marketing directors, group leaders on research projects and thousands of scientists worldwide to find and access high-value information quickly and easily.

Bristol-Myers Squibb employs Autonomy to disseminate critical third-party research and relevant news to R&D scientists at various facilities around the world. This includes the latest content from dozens of leading sources in the pharmaceutical industry, such as Reuters Medical News, The Pink Sheet, Health News Daily, Scrip, PubMed, and Prous Science Daily Essentials.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is one of the world's leading research-based health and pharmaceutical companies. More than 100,000 GSK professionals in 116 countries rely on Autonomy to enable research and development, expedite regulatory approvals and support the company's risk management strategies.

GSK standardized on the Autonomy IDOL platform in 2006 to generate a single pan-enterprise index of organizational information. The IDOL platform approach is used to power multiple business-critical processes throughout the organization and address challenges posed by prolific amounts of unstructured data within the company.