The Bayer Pharma Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (DS&AI) F2F meeting in Madrid was a great event! The motto Connect, Clarify & Commit came to life as we connected during networking sessions, breakout sessions and social events. At the poster session we learned about our progress embedding a product mindset and driving operational excellence, closely collaborating with our partners across R&D. We heard presentations, took part in discussions, unconference sessions, asked questions and shared ideas, setting foundations for the growth of DS&AI beyond 2023. The use of POAPs was a definite social success and I am sure you did not miss Jesús’ enthusiasm as he gave an overview of this new tool. By promoting its use, we drive new ways of using this sustainable and effective tool, ultimately helping to innovate its use by doctors, within clinical trials, for patients and more. There were fun elements as well, like the final night, where our very own flash-mob took to the dance floor and we danced until way past midnight! All this was made possible by the org team: Anke Ebert, Larsen Schnadhorst, Kathleen Thies, Sheila Elz, Stefanie Holt-Noreiks and Claudia Vogt. They have done an excellent job coordinating the event, with the perfect balance of presentations, speakers, entertainment, and networking. Now let us make sure we continue to further the impact we have on bringing innovative medicines to our patients. Sai Jasti, Head of DS&AI https://bayer.com/poap

Hubble is a pioneering data hub that continuously integrates and enriches terabytes of external scientific textual data to support insight generation along the R&D value chain. It opens opportunities for statistical analyses, large-scale text-mining and other data science methodologies to tease out important details and detect trends within e.g., patents, scientific literature, and grants. The Hubble platform is available Bayer-wide, and offers API access for data scientists. This allows large scale, programmatic analysis as well as integration into processes and platforms. Hubble is a cornerstone of our digital transformation journey within R&D. It serves many users, systems and processes with key data & analyses by answering ~2 million queries per week. We continue to extend the platform to best support insight generation and scientific decision making with a precision medicine focus. For more information contact: Astrid Rheinländer.

The SCLM4Future project together with the PRINCE (Preclinical Information Center) project as well as the CONDAS (Connecting Data for Science) team is an excellent example for a successful cross-functional collaboration between CD&O, RED preMed and DS&AI within Research & Development but also between Platform IT and external partners. Together the team achieved to overcome legacy manual processes, redundant maintenance work, and functional silos by introducing new digital solutions and concepts with a strong collaborative mindset. The newly released SCLM 2.0 (Standard Codelist Maintenance) & PTO (Preclinical Terminology and Ontology) systems will enable our organization to improve the quality of controlled terminologies with regards to standard codelists and codes while reducing maintenance time and effort. This will have a positive impact on the code/codelist consistency across clinical and preclinical, as well as the compliance to regulatory requirements (e.g. CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standard Consortium) Controlled Terminology). The approach to share our knowledge as well as our efforts across functions will be an important step to archive our goals to increase data quality, interoperability and reusability – or to make a long story short: to make our data even more FAIR. For more information contact: Daniela Bergann.

Machine Learner, Bioinformatician, Pythonist. AMA!

Hey there, I am Santi and I love applying machine learning to gain insight on hard problems. These days I mostly work with large biomolecules (RNA, DNA and proteins), but sometimes I also get lost in ginormous medical images. In the pic you can see me musing about the stunning architecture of the Reina Sofia Art Center. I hope Madrid was inspiring for you too! Drop me an email if you want to talk about it :-)