Lilly's Speed Gains

When time is money, a dose of IT can be just what the doctor ordered.

BUSINESS/RESEARCH CHALLENGE Potential drug compounds are tested against many organic samples to determine a potential biological response, but promising avenues of research are hard to discover and take a long time to achieve.

solution Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) uses computer-based algorithms to identify the compounds most likely to have drug-candidate properties. Only these compounds are researched further.

payoff Lilly now arrives at a "go" or "no-go" decision for further research quicker, hiking productivity eight- to 100-fold, depending on the type of compounds and screens used.

BUSINESS/RESEARCH CHALLENGE Researchers are slowed by complex retrieval systems and unreliable data: No single database is the repository of records for compounds being researched.

solution The Sample Identification Database, a chemical library, houses data about all Lilly compounds, giving each a single unique identifier and common attributes.

payoff Some 1,000 global users make about 400 new registrations per day. Accurate retrieval of information from the database is now possible in just seconds.

BUSINESS/RESEARCH CHALLENGE Not everyone in Lilly's manufacturing and development staff can access research.

solution The Molecule Library enables key people to access all documentation created for any compound in the pipeline.

payoff Total time savings of 200 to 240 search hours per day across the company.

BUSINESS/RESEARCH CHALLENGE Gene sequence analysis is a complex, specialized skill needed to research new gene therapies under development. The permutations and combinations of genes are not infinite, but they may as well be.

solution GAME (Gene Anatomy Made Easy) is an internally developed software program that lets biologists, toxicologists, physicians and patent attorneys perform their own sequence analysis.

payoff Lilly says GAME is able to generate more information in five minutes than a researcher could perform in four hours.

BUSINESS/RESEARCH CHALLENGE Life sciences data ripe for mining is increasing rapidly in complexity and volume, boosting the amount of data that must be sifted through at a rapid pace.

solution Beacon, a new data warehousing and storage system, replaces sluggish systems and centralizes data.

payoff Helps boost time savings by reducing each data search, on average, from two to three hours down to 20 minutes.