Boehringer Ingelheim's journey to strategically reuse 27 years worth of clinical data

Pharmaceutical companies generate vast amounts of clinical data, yet much of this valuable information remains hidden in legacy data management systems, often inaccessible for meaningful reuse. Boehringer Ingelheim faced the challenge of leveraging this historical data efficiently while ensuring compliance with regulatory, legal, and ethical standards. The complexity, volume, and variability of legacy data made harmonization and integration especially challenging, limiting the ability to gain actionable insights.

The outcome 

To address these challenges, Boehringer Ingelheim initiated the ReSource project, leveraging ONTOFORCE’s DISQOVER platform for ontology-driven cohort selection. DISQOVER utilizes powerful knowledge graph and semantic technology to link, enrich, and harmonize legacy clinical data. This linked data is accessible in an intuitive user interface that allows users to explore patient-level data when selecting cohorts, including demographics, adverse events, lab results, and medical history.

Even users without extensive prior knowledge of historical trials or advanced data science skills can quickly define and refine cohort selections in DISQOVER. Using semantic search and interactive visualizations, DISQOVER empowers researchers to effortlessly identify relevant patient cohorts across multiple historical studies with just a few clicks. In addition, they can gain insight into the availability of clinical samples and associated omics data, streamlining the planning and execution of further research.