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Jan 26, 2019

Big Pharma’s Drug Studies Are Getting a NASA-Style Makeover

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, supercomputing, surveillance

Trying to streamline an operation that spends more than $5 billion a year on developing new drugs, Novartis dispatched teams to jetmaker Boeing Co. and Swissgrid AG, a power company, to observe how they use technology-laden crisis centers to prevent failures and blackouts. That led to the design of something that looks like the pharma version of NASA’s Mission Control: a global surveillance hub where supercomputers map and chart Novartis’s network of 500 drug studies in 70 countries, trying to predict potential problems on a minute-by-minute basis.


A third of development costs comes from clinical trials. Novartis wants to make them cheaper and faster.

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