Howard Jacob on How AbbVie’s ARCH is Unlocking Major Opportunities
By Irene Yeh
August 7, 2024 | At last year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, AbbVie won an Innovative Practices Award for their AbbVie R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH). Their data platform is designed to provide access to knowledge in a faster and more automated way, as well as an easier way to extract insights and connect disparate datasets.
Today, three years after the launch of ARCH, AbbVie has made great strides in data convergence with the platform. In this month’s episode of Trends from the Trenches, Howard J. Jacob, Ph.D., vice president of genomics research at AbbVie, discusses the achievements of ARCH, AbbVie’s efforts in getting more people on board with convergence goals and mission, and the challenges they continue to face.
Dipping Into Rare Diseases
One major accomplishment that ARCH has achieved is using its system for rare diseases. Jacob recounted a personal experience when his high school football coach informed him of a relative who was diagnosed with a rare disease. By using ARCH, Jacob and his colleague Phil Hajduk, vice president of R&D information research at AbbVie, were able to pull up two drugs in the market that could potentially treat this individual’s condition in only four hours. Notably, the off-target effect of both drugs was sufficient enough to hit the target of the rare disease the individual had, according to Jacob.
They did not share this information with the patient, though. “My rule in working with patients is, we’ll only work with your physician,” explained Jacob. Nonetheless, the experience offered hope about ARCH’s potential, as it proved that the platform could help patients with rare diseases in a short amount of time. Jacob further elaborates that AbbVie is continuing its work on ARCH.
AbbVie has put in great effort to spread the word internally of ARCH’s potential. One way is the AbbVie Convergence Journal, an internally peer-reviewed scientific journal where they publish the results of ARCH’s findings. AbbVie also has workshops and internal experimental biology meetings called the AbbVie Community of Science.
Though there is cultural change to be made, interest has increased in ARCH and AbbVie researchers have committed more of their own time and effort and intellectual capital, according to Jacob. “All of it is a result of people realizing that working together is better than working alone.”
Culture Obstacles
But getting AbbVie to consider rare diseases was not easy. “One of the challenges is when you have all this data… you’ve got to have use cases,” he said. “I think one of the challenges with all these extra new things you can do—and AI and machine learning are only making it worse—[is] nobody trusts it. Everybody fixates on the hallucinations.”
Without use cases, changing the minds of skeptics in a rapidly developing and transforming field is a monumental obstacle to overcome. Physicians, in particular, are reluctant to implement AI discoveries because there are no clinical trials to provide results and evidence.
There is also the issue of mistrust toward data that does not belong to the individual. “Why would I trust somebody else’s data?” said Jacob. “We’ve been taught not to do that. You have these different data you don't know what to do with. It's being analyzed with algorithms you don't understand, and you're being asked to make decisions on it. And so, I think that most companies are going to struggle with the culture side, and they’ve got to bite into that.”
To learn more about the origins of ARCH and how Jacob’s team developed it, listen to the latest episode of Trends from the Trenches here.