How a biopharma company accelerated time-to-insights by 20% with AI

Challenge: Scaling pharma literature reviews

Our client’s R&D teams, at an international pharmaceutical company, faced the daunting task of sifting through thousands of scientific publications to extract relevant insights. This manual approach was not only repetitive and time-consuming but also carried high compliance risks: overlooking a critical study or adverse event could slow down development or introduce regulatory challenges. As the volume of biomedical literature continued to grow exponentially, the pressure on the client’s R&D teams to stay thorough and efficient only intensified.

How we helped

To address this challenge, we implemented a user-friendly platform that enables researchers to access, sort, and engage with relevant documents efficiently. Central to this solution is a robust semantic search engine that offers direct answers to specific questions, such as "What are the adverse events?" This advanced functionality not only provides the answer but also directs users to the exact section of the document where the information can be found.
For this solution, our engineers used bidirectional encoder representations from transformers linked with a state-of-the-art NLP model.

The Impact: Accelerating research with AI

• 20% faster time to insights, saving two hours per week per person.
• Pinpointed relevant sections with >90% accuracy.
• The access to extra insights, integrated into product development & design, won the client a Group Level Innovation Award.

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