Amgen's Digital Transformation: Accelerating Drug Development with IoT

Amgen is the world’s largest independent biotech company, known for its innovation in the field of drug-making processes and development of life-saving medicines. For over 40 years, Amgen has been positively impacting the lives of millions around the world. The company operates in three core verticals - clinical trials, manufacturing, and commercialization. As part of its mission to best serve patients, Amgen embarked on a digital transformation journey to leverage its data for better outcomes across the business. The company aimed to improve R&D productivity, optimize supply chains, and enhance commercialization processes.

Amgen, the world’s largest independent biotech company, embarked on a digital transformation journey to leverage its data for better outcomes across the business. The company faced challenges in improving R&D productivity, optimizing supply chains, and commercialization. The problems that the data teams were looking to solve had drastically changed over the years and were no longer isolated by skillset, department, or function. The most impactful problems were cross-functional and required a collaborative approach. Amgen had a wealth of valuable data within its core verticals - clinical trials, manufacturing, and commercialization. However, increasing volumes of data presented challenges when it came to using that data efficiently. The company was unable to weave together the various aspects of its business, which impacted operational efficiency as it scaled both internally and with its customer base. The key challenge was to make it easy to access and process data in a collaborative manner that ties in different personas with different viewpoints on the data.

Amgen chose the Databricks Lakehouse Platform as the foundation for its digital transformation journey. This platform enabled the company to unlock the potential of its data across various organizations, streamlining operational efficiency and accelerating drug discovery. The company transitioned from a legacy technology infrastructure to a Hadoop-based data lake. However, significant data challenges remained, both on the technical side and when it came to processes, cost, and organization. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform enabled a variety of teams and personas to do more with the data. With this unifying and collaborative platform, Amgen was able to utilize a single environment for all types of users and their preferred tools, keeping operations backed by a consistent set of data. The company leveraged Delta Lake to enable ACID compliance, historical lookback, and lower the barrier to entry for developers to begin coding by providing a common data layer for data analysts and data scientists alike to use data to optimize supply chains and improve operations.

• The implementation of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform has helped Amgen to continue achieving its goals of serving patients and improving the drug development lifecycle. The platform has enabled various data teams from engineering to data science to analysts to access and collaborate on data. This has facilitated genomic exploration and research at scale, optimized clinical trial designs, and improved supply chain and inventory optimization. The company has been able to take a modern approach to deliver on a myriad of use cases by focusing on the data, the relationships, and the connections rather than just the technology. The lakehouse approach has fostered collaboration and transparency, enabling the company to spend more time-solving problems that can benefit the patients who need treatments, and less time rebuilding the foundational infrastructure that enables it.

• Data ingestion rates have increased significantly
• Processing times improved by 75%
• 2x faster delivery of insights to the business