Sanofi: Forwarding Medical Advances and Breakthroughs to Help People Have Better Health

Faster time to market in any industry is vital, but in bio-pharmaceuticals, it is even more than that – faster time to market can improve patient care or even change patient outcomes.  For the French multi-national bio-pharmaceutical Sanofi, analytics and data are the key factor in accelerating time to market. Operating in 100 countries around the globe and providing healthcare solutions to more than 170 countries, Sanofi produces critical pharma products for oncology, diabetes, cardiovascular, central nervous system and vaccines.

Our goal is to help people have better health.  We produce vaccines to prevent disease in some of the poorest countries in the world.  We are researching solutions to meet unmet needs. We are also in consumer health, helping people feel better and live better.  We provide this to people all around the world.

– Martin Longpré, Solution Architect

It is well recognized that clinical data is one of the most sensitive industry assets and a competitive advantage that is required for critical evidence of a drug therapy’s efficacy, safety, as well as potential health and economic impact. Managing one of the largest R&D organizations in the bio-pharmaceutical industry, with a diverse pipeline, Sanofi R&D focuses on maximizing the efficiency of its clinical development organization as well as improving visibility into the progress of its global trials. Aiming toward the business outcomes of product innovation and risk mitigation, Sanofi R&D created MAESTRO.  Like a distinguished musician, MAESTRO is an agile, integrated warehouse designed to scale and address the clinical trial challenges that materialize from the high variability of the data captured.  Clinical trial data is as varied as it gets; everything must be entered – patient data, medical test results, protocol data, and medical side effects (even a headache must be captured).

MAESTRO, from the beginning was designed to scale.  Today, the solution is able to address the clinical trial challenges materialized by the high variability of the data captured and the continuous increase in volume introduced by an extensive portfolio of prescription drugs, vaccines, generics, and consumer healthcare products.  Sanofi R&D is able to manage dozens of studies at once (70-75) with the ability to scale to 200.  Researchers are able to refresh the study every ten minutes rather than every forty in the previous environment, allowing them faster access to new information.  And, the lockout time on studies has been reduced from eight hours to just under an hour!

If we think about this system, it allows us to recognize and rapidly address any change in the status of a patient. If a patient experiences an adverse event during a clinical study, especially a serious adverse event, it is important that we get notified immediately so we can respond accordingly. The safety of our patients always comes first, in all the studies we do.

– Martin Longpré, Solution Architect

Teradata’s Enterprise Data Consulting organization helped Sanofi architect, integrate and migrate the data from Oracle to Teradata in addition to being instrumental in implementing important features such as JSON, User Defined Functions and Temporal. Project MAESTRO is impacting business outcomes, including;

• Product Innovation and the ability of the R&D organization to potentially create new products or designs that are safer, more efficient, and meet the market needs sought by doctors and patients.
• Risk identification, mitigation and evaluation should any agency (internal or external) want to understand a study’s traceability.

The major advantage is that we have a history of all the interactions with the patient.  This means from the beginning of the clinical study, let’s say four years ago, to the end of the study, we will be able to provide every action that has taken place with that subject for all the different elements of the study.

– Martin Longpré, Solution Architect

All of which propels Sanofi towards their mission to “shape tomorrow’s health.”

“Félicitations” to Sanofi on project MAESTRO and all of your success!