Big data analytics have become a common consideration in the R&D part of the pharmaceutical industry, allowing researchers to search and share remarkable amounts of data points. But Merck & Co. has turned to the process to solve a manufacturing problem and potentially save hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
According to InformationWeek, the Whitehouse Station, NJ-based drugmaker was having issues with yield rates on a vaccine in 2012 and was going through the painful process of analyzing spreadsheets of process histories and other data to try to solve the problem. It meant comparing only a couple of batches at a time and was going to take a very, very long time. Jerry Megaro, Merck’s director of manufacturing advanced analytics and innovation, thought there had to be a better way and started working with a massively scalable distributed relational database. But then he learned that Merck’s R&D operation could hook him up with cloud-based Hadoop computer, which could do all the things big data analysis is known for.
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