How AbbVie's Digital Transformation Brought Platform Knowledge Closer

A conversation with Diana Bowley, AbbVie

The straightest road to digital transformation starts with observing inefficiencies and then building systems to bring them to heel.

In AbbVie’s bioprocess development labs, those inefficiencies revealed themselves nearly a decade ago with an overwhelming amount of paper lab notes, said Diana Bowley, the company’s director of digital strategy. She was speaking from the stage at the Cambridge Health Institute’s Bioprocessing Summit in August.

In 2017, AbbVie digitized its analytical data, but it was on an island, she said. The process development lab had to reinterpret it for it to be useful. To make the most of its data, AbbVie constructed its own digital ecosystem, rooted in a custom software platform called Espresso, to reduce time spent manipulating data and ensure greater data reliability. The effort brought down the time spent on documentation by about 70% for important experiment types, Bowley said.

We wanted to learn more about the initiative, so we caught up with Bowley after her talk with some specific questions. The transcript below is edited for clarity.

What specific pain points were you trying to address with this digital transformation project?

Bowley: AbbVie's very fortunate right now in our bioprocess development organization that we have a very robust clinical pipeline. So, we have a lot more work than we have people for, and you can't continue to scale and do things the way that you've always done them. So, for us it was really imperative to find ways to work more efficiently to better leverage our data and our platform knowledge. The impetus for starting this digital transformation effort was to manage the amount of work our team was being asked to manage.

How do you ensure that data capture today remains useful tomorrow? This is an issue that affects just about every biopharma company developing processes.

Bowley: I think there's a recognition in certain areas of CMC development that we should be leveraging prior knowledge in how we do our work. So, how do we make sure that we capture that knowledge and its precursor data? And, along those same lines, I think what's shifting is an understanding of when a CMC process is molecule specific, and when it is more generic to that molecule type.

Looking at those processes that are more platform, if you will, how can we make sure we're taking data and knowledge from different products and adding it up together so we can minimize experimentation where it makes sense and focus our efforts on the areas where it really is molecule specific? So, I think that's what we're trying to get to when we're talking about the data capture and the knowledge.

AbbVie constructed its own proprietary system, Espresso. Can you tell us about your decision to develop something in-house as opposed to buying off the shelf? Many of our readers come from biotech companies that may not have the resources to develop something on their own.

Bowley: There's more than one right answer, so its important to have good decision-making processes. Looking back even further, we started the journey trying to use electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs). We found some challenges with that. I know others have had success using ELNs. And then we looked at an R&D-type LIMS, and we got pretty far down the road of requirements-gathering process in a traditional IT waterfall approach. And then at the last minute, as we were about to start implementation, we realized this just isn't going to be a good fit. That was when we pivoted and made the decision to do custom development using an agile IT approach.

Custom development is definitely going to have its challenges, but even using an off-the-shelf software, there's often a lot of configuration involved, and it almost becomes your own solution anyway. I think there's a balancing act between an out-of-the-box solution and a custom configuration that can meet your particular needs. And sometimes it is the right decision to just make a custom solution.

You mentioned AbbVie’s process development labs were drowning in paper before the electronic laboratory notebook endeavor. Is there less paper on the floor? Can you talk about some of the other efficiency gains?

Bowley: We made some policy/procedural decisions in advance about how we would deal with paper in addition to bringing in real-time data from the instruments without needing paper. And I think one particular concern underlying any efficiency gains, for us in CMC development, we need to make sure that we're doing our documentation very well because that data is going to end up in a regulatory filing.

By bringing in the digital tools that we did, we got the documentation benefits without a lot of the manual effort that we had in the old ways of doing things.

Finally, something like this is going to touch so many different teams and change their daily experience. What has adoption of this been like among teams? How has it changed their experience?

Bowley: In any organization, you've got early adopters, you've got people who will come along for the ride, and you've got people who are just going to drag their feet. We had all of them.

My favorite story is when one of our scientists said, “I need the data in Excel. I'm not going to have it in Spotfire.”

I said, “Just trust me. Just give me a minute.”

And about two months after we rolled out the Spotfire dashboard for him to get his data quickly and easily from the analytical team, he came up and said, “You were right. This is so much better. I'm not seeing my data one request at a time. I can now see all of my data across all of the requests in a couple of clicks.”

That's my favorite story about how somebody's life had changed in ways that they didn't even necessarily want at the beginning, but then it made their life much easier in the end.

About The Expert:

Diana Bowley, Ph.D., is director of digital strategy at AbbVie where she’s worked since 2013 in various scientific and IT roles. Previously, she was a senior scientist for Abbott Laboratories; was a research scientist for AnaptysBio, and was a staff scientist at The Scripps Research Institute. She completed her Ph.D. in molecular biology and immunology at Scripps Research.