Data to Decisions: Creating a Culture of Model-Driven Drug Discovery

Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA, is undergoing a transformation in the way that it prosecutes R&D programs. Through the adoption of a “model-driven” culture, enhanced R&D productivity is anticipated, both in the form of decreased attrition at each stage of the process and by providing a rational framework for understanding and learning from the data generated along the way. This new approach focuses on the concept of a “Design Cycle” that makes use of all the data possible, internally and externally, to drive decision-making. These data can take the form of bioactivity, 3D structures, genomics, pathway, PK/PD, safety data, etc. Synthesis of high-quality data into models utilizing both well-established and cutting-edge methods has been shown to yield high confidence predictions to prioritize decision-making and efficiently reposition resources within R&D. The goal is to design an adaptive research operating plan that uses both modeled data and experiments, rather than just testing, to drive project decision-making. To support this emerging culture, an ambitious information management (IT) program has been initiated to implement a harmonized platform to facilitate the construction of cross-domain workflows to enable data-driven decision-making and the construction and validation of predictive models. These goals are achieved through depositing model-ready data, agile persona-driven access to data, a unified cross-domain predictive model lifecycle management platform, and support for flexible scientist-developed workflows that simplify data manipulation and consume model services. The end-to-end nature of the platform, in turn, not only supports but also drives the culture change by enabling scientists to apply predictive sciences throughout their work and over the lifetime of a project. This shift in mindset for both scientists and IT was driven by an early impactful demonstration of the potential benefits of the platform, in which expert-level early discovery predictive models were made available from familiar desktop tools, such as ChemDraw. This was built using a workflow-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) on top of the rigorous registration of all underlying model entities.