Novartis Case Study

Content Management

Rapid Target Review System

The Client

Novartis, Switzerland

The Business Challenge

Scientists spend several days to find the literature relevant to the proteins they are researching upon during the drug discovery process.

The Solution

GGK built a web based engine that can search for literature and present the results based on relevance.

Key Features

  • Integrated with BLAST and other tools provided by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
  • BLAST is performed on target sequence to find similar biological sequences (homologs)
  • Search for literature (white papers, journals, references etc) from public databases (NCBI, IHOP, PDB) and private databases
  • Literature is searched for the target protein and its homologs
  • References are searched based on gene names and other public identifiers
  • Relevance of the reference is calculated based on the keywords & their weights used during the search
  • Integrated with Novartis's legacy databases for Gene lookup
  • Update, Subscribe and Unsubscribe features
  • Email notification
  • Auto update of the targets on weekly basis

Technologies Involved

Java 1.6, Tomcat, MySQL, Linux, BLAST

The Results

  • Drastic reduction in time spent by scientists researching for the literature
  • High quality results based on relevance are presented in less than a hour