Life science organizations need accurate and timely information to make drug development decisions. But understanding, linking, and leveraging all the sources of data across an organization is a constant challenge. And the needs and challenges are likely to become increasingly important as the industry moves toward more multi-disciplinary research efforts and as more information collected about drug safety (from development through trials) is shared throughout an organization.
Composite Software bills itself as an enterprise information integration (EII) company. And like other EII vendors, its tools are frequently used to help assimilate information in administrative and business operations applications.
But increasingly, EII tools are being applied to other areas such as risk management (e.g., ensuring regulatory compliance) or simply to let scientists share and access data in R&D labs.
From an IT perspective, the application of EII tools to any and all of these areas deals with a remarkably similar set of criteria and issues. The normal starting point is that “it is not practical from a technical or organizational ownership perspective to move all the required data into one place,” says Michael Abbott, founder and CTO of Composite Software.
He notes that this is a common situation in both business operations and R&D. For instance, many life science organizations spend great amounts of IT resources developing Web portals that collect information about a particular item – a protein or a drug target, for example – into one Web page.
Composite Software provides tools that allow such aggregation of data into a portal view, but with a twist. Most portals simply provide the ability to present data from various sources in adjacent tabs. But they rely on the person viewing the data to link, or join, various data elements. For instance, a researcher might be able to see scheduled tests for a lab, and separately see proteins relevant to given tests, but have to hand-correlate the lists to understand which proteins will be tested, and when they will be tested.
One thing that helps make such information clearer or easier to interpret is having access to any meta-data associated with a dataset. That is an area where Composite Software can help. Its Composite Information Server includes a meta-data repository along with other features that include a query engine, a library of views, and performance caching.
Application of EII software is finding new uses in both business operations and R&D these days, according to Abbott. For instance, with mergers and acquisitions on the rise, such tools are often used by executive management to quickly get a handle on cross-company business issues.
Within R&D, Abbott believes the tools can help break down research-centric silos by enabling scientists in different disciplines to more easily access data of researchers elsewhere. A related, industry-specific issue that can be addressed with such tools is the enforcement of data security (authentication and visibility filters to control who sees what) to meet regulatory requirements.
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