The Research Engine – a Digital Platform

Our client’s state-of-the-art research engine is a foundational digital platform we have helped build to advance the potential of mRNA science for a broad range of therapeutics. That research engine has been developed as a greenfield project and combines proprietary technology, design tools, and highly automated pipelines to enable our client and their partners to move mRNA medicines swiftly through the research stages from development to candidate nomination. The ability to digitize such a platform allows our client to quickly adapt and reduce time spent on failures. Since these learnings are digitized, they can easily translate to other drug candidates and improve quality and scalability.

Delivery

We have participated in the development of many key building blocks required to digitize our client’s research engine.

Our scientific software engineering team members assisted with the UI/UX design of the research engine. With the implementation of full-stack web applications and graphical user interfaces, the scientists could digitally design and order mRNA constructs for research and preclinical studies. They could select existing proteins to be further engineered or create novel proteins from existing sequences.

Our scientific software developers used various cloud services to enhance our client’s scientists’ computational capabilities and reduce costs. These services allowed our client to easily scale up or down and automate the processes required to do so.

Then, we integrated all data and applications, so they were as efficient as possible. This ecosystem of integrated applications queried data that’s persisted in different data islands of the data fabric. It was important to remain tactical, so we automated one data island at a time and prioritized urgent problems.

With a proactive data strategy and tactical approach, we supported the expansion of analytics from the start using the integrated eco-system of applications and newly generated FAIR data.

Value

To conclude, the research engine we developed brought mRNA drug sequences to our client’s automated high throughput production facility. The digital design and rapid delivery of mRNA constructs helped our client move mRNA medicines from idea to candidate selection in DNA studies and, ultimately, to clinical trials. Our client was able to accelerate the pace of research to advance mRNA medicines into development.