Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company, was facing several challenges in its downstream process development operations. The company was struggling with data silos as instrument vendors did not integrate with one another, leading to manual data movement. The proprietary data formats of vendors required their specific tools, which hampered third-party data standardization. Additionally, informatics leads had to manually move, update, and curate files from multiple locations. Scientists were also required to enter peak information into analytical software themselves. Furthermore, existing dashboarding tools had steep learning curves and could not manage metadata. Scientists were constantly needing to test their hypotheses and derive useful insights from heterogeneous data sources.

Pharmaceutical and biotech organizations frequently collaborate with Contract Research Organizations (CROs) for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) testing of pharmacokinetics (PK) properties of drug candidates. However, most CROs use their own data formats for standard assays, which can pose data aggregation challenges to biopharma companies. The ability to harmonize data from different CRO reports is critical to scale up ADME/PK processes. The manual data workflows for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) studies are laborious. Scientists have to manually check the reports from CROs, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.