Pharma's Desperate Struggle To Teach Old Data New Tricks

While pharma C-suite executives find themselves increasingly seduced by the promise of "digital transformation," and especially by the idea of leveraging AI, the lived, on the ground reality within virtually all pharma R&D organizations couldn't be further removed. "It's about the data," argues Dr. Amy Abernethy, Principal Deputy Commissioner of the FDA and experienced health data wrangler (2017 photo). Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan candidly alluded to this in January when he reflected on his company's digital transformation journey, and said, "The first thing we've learned is the importance of having outstanding data to actually base your ML on. In our own shop, we've been working on a few big projects, and we've had to spend most of the time just cleaning the data sets before you can even run the algorithm. That's taken us years just to clean the datasets. I think people underestimate how little clean data there is out there, and how hard it is to clean and link the data."