Data Management Platform to Securely Consolidate Data across 15 Subsidiaries of a Biotech Company

About Our Client

The Client is a biopharmaceutical company that combines natural science and advanced technology to develop alternative treatments for mental disorders, using data-driven drug development and digital therapeutics to innovate and personalize mental healthcare globally.

Decentralized Scientific Data Was Holding Back Research

The Client's group comprises 15 subsidiaries operating worldwide. Over the years, the Client had accumulated vast scientific data — research findings, preclinical reports, trial protocols, and clinical trial reports. However, because storage and management were decentralized, it was hard for the subsidiaries' clinical scientists and managers to extract the full value of this data.

Defining the Scope of a Data Consolidation Solution

The Client initially approached INNERLUXES to build a solution that would consolidate research data from globally dispersed sources into a data warehouse with analytics capabilities. Drawing on our data warehousing experience and first-hand expertise from many healthcare data analytics projects, the team analyzed the Client's goals and the overall maturity of its IT ecosystem, and concluded that most of the subsidiaries' current systems could not be integrated with a DWH within the required timeframe due to their technical and organizational isolation.

With that in mind, the Client decided to start with a data management platform that would centralize the subsidiaries' data and enable easy navigation and presentation. Since all subsidiaries are legally independent entities, strictly defined user access rights were also critical.

To meet the Client's priorities and tight deadlines, INNERLUXES proposed splitting the project into two steps:

• Developing an MVP enabling the most critical capabilities: centralized data storage, role-based access, and ML-powered data search.
• Investigating the subsidiaries' systems and data to prepare the solution to evolve into a full-scale DWH supporting unstructured data, ML-based analytics, and direct integrations with the subsidiaries' data sources.

An AWS Data Management Platform as a Foundation for a Data Warehouse

INNERLUXES delivered the MVP design in six weeks. The solution is a data management platform that stores each subsidiary's data in a dedicated folder, enables keyword search across all folders, and allows data access with restrictions defined by the data owner.

Data ingestion

The MVP can ingest three data formats — DOCX, PDF, and CSV. Users manually prepare and upload files to cloud storage (Amazon S3) over the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Each of the 15 subsidiaries has a dedicated folder in the centralized repository. The storage also supports data versioning, so users can upload newer versions of files while retaining access to previous iterations.

Data search

Users can run keyword searches with filters across all folders. The system uses an AWS Lambda function to find documents containing a given keyword, and Amazon QuickSight provides a dashboard table listing the matching files with links to them.

Security

Data access is restricted by row-level security policies that define which records are revealed to each user or user group, with each folder's owner determining the access rights. Stored data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and encryption is also applied to administrative, system, and user-action logs.

Availability and fault tolerance

The system has recovery and backup mechanisms for fast recovery from an unplanned event or primary data failure, and can recover from any single point of failure automatically.

Evolution capabilities

The platform's layers are built with regionally distributed processing and encryption to support future GDPR and HIPAA compliance. INNERLUXES also provided an architecture design for upgrading the platform to a data warehouse in the future — supporting unstructured data (e.g., images), data processing (e.g., slicing and dicing, segmentation), advanced visualization (e.g., three-dimensional graphs), and ML-powered analytics (e.g., forecasting, anomaly alerting).

Cross-Subsidiary Data Availability with Granular Security

Within six weeks, the Client received a comprehensive MVP design for a data management platform. Once implemented, it will let scientists and managers across geographically dispersed subsidiaries gain immediate access to valuable clinical and non-clinical data, streamlining new drug development and improving the treatment of mental disorders.

INNERLUXES also provided a detailed roadmap to MVP implementation, complete with guidelines on setting up and managing the required tools and systems. The delivered design enables data access control across 15 legally independent entities and is ready to be expanded with advanced data processing, visualization, and analytics capabilities.

Technologies and Tools

SFTP, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda Functions, Amazon QuickSight.