BIG DATA infrastructures for pharmaceutical research

Big Data is an emerging paradigm covering production, collection, processing, analysis, access and presentation of huge data-sets: Big Data infrastructures represent an opportunity to approach this paradigm on an organizational level. We describe challenges and opportunities of big data infrastructures for the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical research and product development are huge investments and require intense exploration and analysis of data. Future trends show that pharmaceutical companies need to develop new methods of data and information processing to quicker and more precisely respond to changing markets and the need of patients and providers. The individual case and patients will become more influential in healthcare delivery and in consequence for the rationale behind these decisions. Our approach of a platform for semantic exploitation of BIG DATA supports a knowledge based infrastructure for deep analysis of clinical information from structured sources and clinical narratives. This infrastructure is able to pave the way towards the necessary big data-management possibilities. Example applications for cancer research will be given.