For Your Information

At Merck Research Labs (MRL), IT plays a crucial role in many aspects of the company, from drug discovery all the way through to regulatory, drug surveillance and technology support for licensing. MRL has invested in many robust IT systems and tools that enable its scientists to push the boundaries of scientific research.

There is no such thing as an average day at the company, and Jim Swanson’s role as VP of Information Technology is a varied and rewarding one. “My tasks could include looking at strategy or at new or innovative technologies in different parts of our business,” enthuses Swanson. “We have created an innovation group that looks three to five years ahead at the emerging technologies and sees how we can maximize these and implement them for the benefit of our scientists."

Working directly with the scientific community is a crucial aspect of the job, and Swanson engages with them to understand where they’re taking the science and how to ensure the best IT support to meet their needs and those of the Merck enterprise.

“It could be dealing with program or portfolio issues. We make commitments to our scientific colleagues to deliver certain capabilities and solutions. It could be looking at integration of information or creating opportunities where we’re trying to pull information.”

Enabling IT learnings

"One thing that sets us apart from other IT groups is that we’re doing hypothesis-driven experiments,” Swanson explains. Collaborating with both internal and external partners, Merck’s IT innovation group designs and executes short, three-month experiments to evaluate the expected impact of a new technology on a business situation.

Swanson’s team approaches IT experiments in a similar way to how Merck scientists approach their work. After agreeing on a business priority, they create a hypothesis – a candidate explanation of a current or an anticipated future business situation. They then create a testable predication to gauge the expected positive impact of the new technology on the business situation.

Interdisciplinary external/internal teams with common motivation and interests are assembled and tasked to test the hypothesis. The teams design and execute a short (three-month) experiment to test the prediction, while ensuring collaborative execution to maximize input and learning. At the end of the experience, value is extracted via the results, which are then communicated among the management team to inform future IT investment decisions. When experiments ‘fail’, this is still considered ‘good’ as the information extracted from the ‘failed’ experiment can be utilized among existing programs to improve efficiency.

“We don’t necessarily want to succeed in every experiment, because part of innovation is knowing how to fail and how to learn from these failures so that we can bring in something better,” says Swanson. “Our goal is to use these experiments to determine the effectiveness of emerging technologies and whether they align with business needs.”

Data deluge

A key value of Merck Research Lab’s information technology is in the integration of information across the entire R&D process and in the connections IT enables between and among Merck’s scientists, external partners and collaborators.

The incredible increase of information assets driven by the growth in genomics, proteomics and other areas has made bioinformatics a key focus at MRL. New technologies, including genomic and proteomic tools, create enormous amounts of data that need to be processed and mined. There are terabytes of information generated in different formats and different forms in this area. To counter this ‘data deluge’, one of the key investments the department has made in the last few years is a high performance computing platform to help with the processing and analysis of information in an effective way. This can then be used to generate knowledge of the biological systems, mechanisms or candidates being analyzed in drug discovery and development.

“ MRL has invested in many robust IT systems and research tools that enable our scientists to push the boundaries of biomedical research, including gene expression arrays and genome-wide RNAi screens.” explains Swanson. “The Rosetta Inpharmatics acquisition in 2001 brought along great genomic and scientific expertise, plus some industry-grade tools that enabled our interpretation and analysis of bioinformatics data. We also made significant investments in our infrastructure to include data mining, modeling, simulation and visualization tools. In addition, we’ve made investment across our R&D life cycle in technology for the areas of clinical biomarker analysis for our use and with external partners, so that we can better support and enable managing that stream of information.”

Swanson points out that some of the main challenges are in the processing of this material. Because of this, Merck has made core investments in high performance computing. “We have invested pretty heavily in the search environment.This allows us to associate information from different repositories in a way that is easy for scientists to access, so that they’re able, along with the clinical organization, to understand how diseases themselves are defined and how to best treat those diseases.

“The power of informatics is moving past just the early research space, into the clinical space and across the R&D life cycle. This is a key challenge, especially when you think about integration of information. We think about the external partners we need to work with to best support understanding of disease and treating of that disease.

“The other area of focus is something we call ‘pillars of connectivity’. With this, we’re bringing together the best of information by connecting people and collaborating to build knowledge. Our goal is to bring these pillars together in a way that connects internal and external science and information, and builds knowledge to define, understand and treat disease.”

Successful projects

Jim is proud of a number of projects his organization has delivered to Merck Research Labs. A great example is the recent collaboration with the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, in the translational medicine research space. This collaboration was recently recognized with a Bio-IT World Best Practices Award as a shining example of breaking down clinical and research silos to enable translational research.

This collaboration involves Moffitt providing tumor samples coming from identified patients. Merck is then able to link tumor samples with clinical outcomes, and link that with their molecular profiling group for analysis. Once the samples are analyzed, a detailed readout of the data is shared with Moffitt, where it is used internally for clinical research. In turn, Merck is able to use the clinical data associated with each sample. This collaboration – a pioneering approach to integrating translational medicine data – resulted in the first clinical oncology data housed in Merck’s clinical data repository.

Joint project teams of Merck and Moffitt clinical and basic researchers are together mining the shared data, building experiments and trials and identifying new mechanisms of action.

“This work created a great opportunity to showcase how technology can bring together different data sets with very strong partners,” recalls Swanson. “It brought together Moffitt and Merck scientists, with their scientific and clinical rigor, and people working at Merck’s subsidiary Rosetta, with its molecular profiling capabilities and computing power, along with the advances that we’ve made in technology in the clinical space. By bringing all this information together, we can better understand and help define the causes of disease and also directly support Merck’s core mission to meet unmet medical needs. We’re particularly proud of this investment, because it demonstrates how technology can be used to network groups and enable leading edge science.”

Swanson envisions that the team will continue its investment in external collaborations in the future, one of the targets being the greater ability to support some of the technologies in the lab. The company is continuing its strong relationship with Moffitt and other external institutes so as to better integrate and access their information.

“We realize that more than 99 percent of biomedical research is done outside of our own research labs, which means that external collaborations must be a key strategy for Merck,” Swanson says.

Platform issues

With multiple platform issues due to the different software required for genomics, proteomics and LIMS, operational efficiency is a also key priority. “When we think about some of the IT platforms, we’ve moved from an environment where we’ve had a lot of homegrown individual point solutions and tried to simplify our platformacross the life cycle. We’re making good progress – it’s enabling us to focus in on this, and pair our leading-edge science with our IT capabilities to enable end-to-end value stream.”

Swanson points out that, thankfully, technology in this area is maturing. “As much as we can, we try to go towards industry standards and tools that really help enable us to link that information,” he says.

Swanson and his team have made significant strides in moving to industry standards that allow better linking and integration of information. Overall, they have made some great investments in their platform space in areas such as eNotebook. They have also collaborated with external partners, allowing them to move past independent technology platforms and enabling them to better integrate and associate that information so it’s useful to scientists across the drug discovery and development continuum.

The company’s flexible Global Technology Services organization is key to crossing the chasm between clinical and basic research. Without it, Swanson’s team would not have been able to bridge this gap and appropriately expose information throughout the organization.

When it comes to technology, there are a number of solutions that Swanson is excited about. Merck is currently piloting information integration tools and capabilities to increase information flow and access. “We’re trying to see how far we can extend the envelope of some of those tools,” he explains. “We’re pinpointing where they’re mature and where they’re still evolving. We’ve done some great evaluations and investigations – Semantic Web is an example where I think there’s tremendous opportunity and promise. Merck has developed a prototype application to support recently acquired Abmaxis using Semantic Web. This application will allow the integration of data and provide search and annotation capabilities for antibody research.”

A continued maturing in the analytics and data mining space is something that Swanson expects to see in the future. “We’ve made some pretty significant investments in harnessing the power of data modeling and simulation and extending the ability of analytics and digitalization because we get deluged with this data. It’s only as good as you can interpret and then capture that knowledge. Therefore, visualization becomes really key and critical in that effort.

Looking ahead

Swanson is bullish on the ability of advances in IT to help enable Merck Research Labs to fulfill its mission to discover novel and differentiated drugs. “By establishing an infrastructure to harness patient information in a secure environment, and integrate it with Merck’s science, we are working to develop novel treatments for disease. Collaborations between external scientists and Merck scientists, along with many great external technology partners, provide analytics, data integration and visualization across increasingly complex sets of information.

“Future opportunities to develop novel medicines and vaccines to treat unmet medical needs will arise from the integration of patient information, outcomes information and scientific information. Working with great partners – like the Moffitt Cancer Center – and technology helps Merck advance the science and meet its core mission.”

About James D. Swanson

James is VP Global Services IT for Merck Research Laboratories. In this role, he is responsible for providing global IT leadership and strategy, including the planning, evaluation, execution and maintenance of major information systems spanning the R&D lifecycle. He joined the company in 2005.

Before joining Merck, Swanson was VP at Johnson & Johnson, where he held overall responsibility for the IT strategy and execution supporting Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D.