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

ChemogenomicsDB (CGDB) and Älixir are prime examples of creating data assets and insight solutions to help improve digital and data capabilities, enhance scientific productivity, and invigorate early pipeline. Using our products, Bayer R&D colleagues can - access to a broad range of data assets essential for solving key drug discovery questions - explore integrated biomedical and chemical data for scientific curiosity, inspiration, and knowledge discovery - generate insights with the assistance of interactive visualizations for evidence-informed decision making

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.

Team R&D Master Data Management (MDM) is responsible for the processes and technologies used to ensure the consistency, accuracy, and completeness of critical data that is used across various departments and functions within the R&D organization. MDM plays a crucial role in ensuring the reliability of scientific and clinical data used for research, drug development, regulatory submissions, and decision-making. Key responsibilities include: define and implement data standards & policies, develop and maintain a centralized master data repository, establish data quality controls, ensure data steward- and ownership, manage data integration from different sources and systems, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and provide training and support for end-users across R&D to ensure proper use and interpretation of data.

Collaborations with external partners may lead to joint legal rights for compounds and data, which may restrict reusage in other projects. With the increasing number of collaborations at Bayer and with advancing time, memories of the project details fade, and reconstruction of the status will be nearly impossible. Therefore, we aim for a system to document the role of compounds, which will facilitate decisions on further usage in other collaborations. For more information contact: Miriam Wollenhaupt. Images taken from Microsoft Office free for use pictograms.

The Data Assets and Insights Solutions subfunction, DAIS, consists of a team of dedicated computer and data scientists which combine deep R&D process and domain expertise (biology, chemistry, pharmacy, etc) with advanced computational expertise (software engineering, natural language processing, scalable architectures, bio- & chem-informatics, data integration & visualization, etc). We integrate, enrich and harmonize large scientific datasets to build foundational data assets which are used by the R&D organization and our team to build insights solutions. They address key R&D challenges to improve speed, quality and probability of success of our R&D pipeline. Selected business critical tasks within R&D we are focusing on: - Target identification including holistic assessment - Disease understanding including precision medicine - Pipeline evaluation (therapeutic potential and risks) - Modality selection including identification of tool compounds - Identification of collaboration and in-licensing opportunities For more information contact: Wolfgang Thielemann. Artwork: Licensed pictures.

Our vision at Data Science Services & Solutions, DS3, is to Enable, Scale, and Operationalize R&D Data Science & AI capabilities to achieve Clinical Research and Development Speed, Efficiency, and Optimization. Learn more about our areas of responsibility, capabilities, strategic priorities, and collaborations. For more information, contact DS3 Head: Abi Velurethu. Artwork created using Stable Diffusion.

Given the considerable amount of data that is collected throughout clinical trials, it can be asked if this data can be used to improve our understanding of the trial, regardless of outcome. The radiomics pilot seeks to provide a toolkit that is capable of analyzing the different modalities of information found in clinical trials (genome, gene expression, biomarker, clinical information, and imaging information) to derive insights into why a patient may be responding, or why a clinical trial was unsuccessful. The current efforts have focused on clinical trials in oncology, while collaborating with the RED-ONC function. Overall, the project is in its pilot state, and demonstrating a proof of concept, while documenting many challenges and learnings with the development of such a toolkit. Potential directions that could expand this toolbox include deriving the factors that best predict why a patient would stay in a clinical trial, and providing assistance with patient selection of clinical trials. Other potential directions involve suggesting why a particular trial may have been unsuccessful and providing that information back to the drug development team.

With the new head of R&D Community Engagement, RDCE, a new set-up has also been introduced, which newly regulates the tasks and responsibilities of the business partners assigned to the functions, SPOCs, which stands for Single Point of Contact. What is now in scope and what is not? The poster provides information on this.