As one of the biggest names in the life sciences market, Bayer has an extensive drug development process spanning multiple stages to ensure drug safety and efficacy. It’s a process that can take more than a decade to complete, and each step generates a significant amount of data that must be stored responsibly while remaining easy for researchers to access and reference.

For almost four years, Thoughtworks has worked together with Bayer to make the most of its preclinical data by improving access and analysis of past and ongoing drug development programs. Initially Bayer built a preclinical information center (PRINCE, a modern data platform built on AWS cloud), as a onestop shop for all preclinical data. One strength of the platform is that it combines structured and unstructured data from around 17,000 completed study reports and their associated metadata. Whenever researchers need to refer to a previous study of a specific compound or species, they can easily find it in PRINCE

When the platform was introduced, it accelerated the way scientists worked with preclinical data significantly and made it more convenient for researchers to find the insights they needed. But with a goldmine of preclinical information available through the platform, Bayer recognized this was just the beginning of what could be achieved.