Our client’s requirement
A global pharmaceutical giant developing a promising drug candidate, an inhibitor of Target X. This drug is undergoing successful early-stage clinical trials.
he client wanted to go beyond early trials and understand the drug’s potential performance for a specific disease. Additionally, they aimed to assess if the drug could be considered “best-in-class” compared to existing medications. However, a major hurdle existed: the vast amount of publicly available data on the disease and existing drugs was scattered across various platforms and formats, creating significant data heterogeneity. This heterogeneity included inconsistencies in data types, sources, and normalizations. Furthermore, the metadata, information describing the data itself, lacked standardization, requiring extensive manual effort for structuring and harmonization.
Our approach
Excelra tackled the challenge by implementing a multi-phased approach:
Data Acquisition: Excelra built a large dataset encompassing public data relevant to a specific disease and target. This included data from various platforms and technologies, along with associated publications for evidence verification.
Data Curation: The team focused on meticulously curating the data by identifying and collecting relevant variables from dataset metadata, capturing details at both dataset and sample levels, extracting data from publications when necessary for self-contained analysis and utilizing standardized vocabulary for data consistency.
Data Analysis Challenges: Due to the diverse origins of the data, maintaining the biological integrity during analysis was challenging. Multiple approaches were needed for batch correction and co-normalization and significant pathway regulation identification.
Technical Expertise: Excelra leveraged AWS servers for data collection, harmonization, and analysis.
Project Optimization: By leveraging learnings from this project, Excelra aims to achieve faster turnaround times for future projects and consistent high-quality data outputs.
