Big Data is much talked about these days, in almost all walks of life. In the life sciences as well as in health care, the new ability to deep-mine ever-growing amounts of data for previously unrecognized context has opened entirely new possibilities.
While H.M. Pharma Consultancy fully recognizes the new perspectives that Big Data offers, and closely works with partners who have developed specific tools for algorithmic data mining, our own operations focus on highly knowledge-driven methods: we prefer drilling over dredging.
In other words: if we do not already have a good idea how a customer’s problem can be solved, we will use exploratory data mining to develop such a concept. From that point onwards towards the final result, it is expert knowledge and manual iterative searching (with sophisticated search tools).
Our own internal drug development databases are of central importance in this respect. They go back to the early 1990s and are constantly updated with the most recent information from peer review papers, conference reports, patent applications, news releases, and public corporate documents. Our Discontinued Drug and Candidate Database (DDCD) is being built from these and other data sources.