Page 111 - Building Big Data Applications

Chapter 5 Pharmacy industry applications and usage 107

How big data applications change the landscape: a very interesting situation to look
into is the big data landscape changing the entire drug discovery process. Take for
example the application to visualize the whole-body protein targets for a given disease,
using a specific combination of drugs. This application will require us to mashup
different areas of data, from discovery to clinical trials to actual outcomes. The mashup
will require us to use an application layer like Tableau, with Apache Drill as an inter-
connection to federate the data from different source platforms or subject areas. The
subject areas can be all in one system across different directories or different systems,
the query integration will execute each query independently and combine the outcomes
as needed for the mashup. This gives rise to a fantastic idea, where we realize that by
integrating a specific set of subject areas with a key focus target set, we can easily create a
drug discovery platform with outcomes defined and managed using technology. This
disruption is what we have been waiting for a number of years, and the disruption is
resilient in its incorporation into the enterprise. We have read multiple case studies from
Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson&Johnson, Merck, and others on their successful
transformations.
The key focus areas shown in Fig. 5.3, which we are discussing includes the following:

Current drug and composition
New drugs and composition
Patient recruitment
Patient adherence
Segmentation of diagnosed and undiagnosed patients
Integration of social media data
Improve safety signal detection
Disease pattern analysis
Flexible and faster design of products, trials, and treatments

Pa ent Clinical Outcomes
Requirements
Trials Analysis

Differen al
Disease States Animal tes ng
Analy cs

Reverse
Target Predic ve
Outcomes Analy cs Spectrum Drug approval
Analysis

Pa ent Computer Drug research Drug panel
Acquisi on aided research submission review

FIGURE 5.3 Drug discovery and research.