Sinequa Selected by UCB to Reduce Time and Cost of Searching Clinical Trial Data

NEW YORK, NY - Dec 16, 2015 -  

Sinequa, a leader in real-time Big Data search and analytics, today announced that UCB has selected the Sinequa Big Data Search & Analytics Platform to speed vital information discovery of its clinical trial file share. Using the Sinequa Platform, UCB is able to more effectively find data sets that will help expedite responding to questions arising in the lifecycle of drug development, in order to serve the patients’ demand for new drug therapies.

A multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, UCB has more than 8,500 employees worldwide. The company develops therapies for people living with severe diseases, with a specific focus on central nervous system and immunology disorders including Crohn’s disease, Psoriatic arthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis, Epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

In the process of researching new medicinal therapies and refining existing ones, UCB performs extensive clinical trials. To support its drug development processes the company must often search and discover in the volumes of Big Data it retains throughout the development of its products. Over the past 15 years, the company has amassed more than 10 million files which need to be searched to discover insight and locate data sets for statistical analyses continuing even more than ten years after the initial trials. These files, which consume 20TB of data which is currently growing at a rate of 30% a year, include more than a million SAS data sets with billions of data rows as well as SAS program code, ASCII, Microsoft Office and PDF files. With the number of file types and volume of content, search and discovery was a mounting challenge. As a result, UCB’s business objectives required a reduction of the time and cost by implementing an enterprise search capability that permits analysts and programmers to quickly locate relevant clinical data files.

To achieve this objective, UCB selected Sinequa. This easy to implement platform enables UCB to easily find data faster, making the processing of requests easier and much more efficient.  For example, with a simple query, statisticians and/or data managers can easily find data relevant for their current study/analysis and more quickly discover the link to and background of the original study, any of the related data or documents that exist to support the study. Even more, it helps to find data about the study that researchers may not have known about previously. This can reduce the time needed for additional searches and/or new analyses by orders of magnitude and helps UCB to respond quickly to questions by regulatory authorities as well as possibly answering new questions concerning the use of a drug in specific populations. 

“SAS data sets comprise as much as 70% of our clinical development file content. No other company we evaluated could handle SAS data sets like Sinequa,” said Todd Culverwell, Director, Trial Master File and Clinical Repositories, UCB. “We can simply search for a key phrase and be directed right away to a row in a SAS data set. We can also use any number of 900 SAS clinical dataset variables and ask for results within a value range for each of these variables. In some cases what once took weeks, can be easily be produced within a day or two.”

“Sinequa is simply great technology,” said Oliver Thoennessen, Senior Manager Global IT Drug Development, UCB. “We immediately saw its benefit watching it perform something we didn’t know was possible. It makes an exponential difference for our organization. We were also impressed with the number of smart connectors available out-of-the-box and Sinequa’s unique ability to develop new ones.”

“Biostatisticians face tremendous challenges in identifying the right datasets when performing their analyses. Assembling the right data set with a comprehensive list of patients that have a certain disease or developed adverse effects when taking certain drugs can take a lot of time, and extensive resources,” said Xavier Pornain, VP Sales & Alliances, Sinequa. “Sinequa delivers a comprehensive solution for both structured and unstructured data that enables an unprecedented understanding that can have significant value to organizations like UCB and the patients they serve. As a result they can reduce the time and cost of clinical trials ultimately enabling their ability to accelerate time to market.”

By leveraging advanced natural language processing along with transparent structured and unstructured data indexing, Sinequa’s platform enables customers to embark on ambitious big data projects, achieve critical in-depth content analytics and establish an extremely agile development environment for Search Based Applications (SBA). Global enterprises, including Airbus, AstraZeneca, Atos, Biogen, ENGIE, Total and Siemens have all trusted Sinequa for the guidance and collaboration to harness big data to find relevant insight to move business forward.

To learn more about Sinequa for Life Sciences, please visit: www.sinequa.com/content/sinequa-for-life-sciences.aspx

About Sinequa
Recognized as a leader in the Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search and The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions, Q3 2015, Sinequa provides a real-time Big Data Search & Analytics platform for Fortune Global 2000 companies and government agencies. It offers users Unified Information Access to all textual and database data, supported by powerful analytics. Millions of users in the world's largest and most information-intensive organizations, including Airbus, AstraZeneca, Atos, Biogen, Credit Agricole, Mercer, Siemens and UCB, rely on Sinequa to put business-critical information at the fingertips of their employees. Sinequa develops its expertise and its business around the world with a broad network of technology and business partners. For more information, visit www.sinequa.com/.