What this document is
In October 2014, the contract research organization Covance and Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), the drug-discovery arm of Novartis, announced a collaboration to expand NIBR's existing clinical data warehouse into a larger, more capable data platform. The stated goal was to let researchers store both preclinical and clinical study results in a single system and pull them together more easily during drug development.
According to trade press coverage of the announcement, Covance's data science team worked with NIBR scientists on the underlying architecture, with an emphasis on handling growing volumes of study data without forcing separate repositories for different stages of a drug's development pipeline. Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.
The collaboration reflected a wider push across large pharmaceutical companies around that period to apply data-warehousing and analytics techniques, often described using the term big data, to speed up translational research linking early laboratory findings to later clinical results. Covance itself was later acquired by LabCorp, which continues to operate the combined drug-development business.
Where to find it
No current copy from Covance / Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research is linked here.