MarkLogic Joins the Pistoia Alliance to Support R&D Innovation

I’m really pleased to share the news that MarkLogic has joined the Pistoia Alliance. The Alliance is a global, not-for-profit members’ organization made up of over 150 life science companies, technology and service providers, publishers, and academic groups working to lower barriers to innovation in life science and healthcare research and development (R&D).

We are very pleased to welcome MarkLogic into The Pistoia Alliance, and look forward to working with them to achieve our goal of lowering barriers to innovation in the life science industry. The world of life sciences R&D continues to change rapidly – and sharing, partnering, and collaborating will be essential to increased innovation. As our membership continues to grow, our projects and initiatives will be vital in fostering this collaborative mind-set and leading to new breakthroughs.”

Dr. Steve Arlington, President of The Pistoia Alliance

The Pistoia Alliance was conceived in 2007 and incorporated in 2009 by representatives of AstraZeneca, GSK, Novartis and Pfizer who met at a conference in Pistoia, Italy. I’ve worked with them over the years through my time at various companies that serve the life sciences industry, and their projects and events are excellent.

The Alliance’s projects transform R&D through pre-competitive collaboration. The Alliance and its projects are designed to overcome common R&D obstacles by identifying the root causes, developing standards and best practices, sharing pre-competitive data and knowledge, and implementing technology pilots. Members collaborate on projects that generate significant value for the worldwide life sciences R&D community, using the Alliance’s proven framework for open innovation.

Why we joined the Alliance

With a number of MarkLogic customers as members of the Alliance, we’re looking forward to collaborating, discussing industry challenges and bringing best practices and knowledge gained not only from life sciences but from other industries such as financial services, media, and manufacturing where our customers are running mission-critical systems on MarkLogic technology.

One area we’re already getting involved in is the newly launched SEED (Semantic Enrichment of ELN Data) project, where we’re planning to leverage our years of experience in putting semantics to work. There’s huge potential opportunity and benefit for life sciences organizations that can better harness the information in their electronic lab notes (ELN) systems – much of which is free text, unstructured data, often spread across various different ELNs.

A key aspect of any R&D project is always accessing and integrating data from across and outside an organization. To accelerate drug discovery, pharmaceutical organizations need a fast, cost-effective way to integrate, search and operationalize diverse datasets for R&D. Enabling up to 10X faster disparate data integration, a complete view of data, intelligent search, improved data governance, and government-grade security, MarkLogic provides an efficient, agile approach to research platform development.

By simplifying data integration, MarkLogic helps organizations gain agility, lower IT costs, and safely share their data. Seven of the largest Pharma companies utilize MarkLogic technology to support their initiatives in R&D, Pharmacovigilance and Supply Chain. If you’d like to learn more, check out the links we’ve included below.

For more information

• Visit the Pistoia Alliance site
• Explore MarkLogic solutions for the Life Sciences industry
• Read our blog post describing how top pharmaceutical companies are using semantic ontologies to help build a fully interoperable “single source of truth” for their enterprise data