With the corporate philosophy of "Innovation all for the patients", Chugai Pharmaceutical aims to add exceptional value through the creation of innovative medical products and services for the benefit of the medical community and human health around the world. They have formed a strategic alliance with the Roche Group, which is one of the global leading pharmaceutical companies, to sell Roche Group medicines within Japan and provide innovative medicines to the world.

In March of 2020, Chugai Pharmaceutical announced "Chugai Digital Vision 2030", which will help further a digital transformation that is completely different from conventional digitalization. "The basic strategy of Chugai Digital is to create innovative new drugs using digital technology, improve the efficiency of all value chains, and strengthen digital infrastructure. The biggest challenge of this strategy was to build digital infrastructure that can securely handle large volumes of data," says Satoko Shisai, Executive Director of Digital & IT.

Chugai Pharmaceutical had also operated multiple forms of on-premise infrastructure for research development and data analysis. Cooperative research was not possible as the research division undertook each research individually, which took time to set up environments and increased costs. Therefore, Chugai Pharmaceutical decided to build their company-wide data utilization infrastructure "Chugai Scientific Infrastructure" with the aim of inter-departmental use of internal data and promoting cooperative projects with outside parties, and AWS was used to build the infrastructure.
"There was no point spending the six months to a year to build the infrastructure for researching new drugs. Avoiding the massive costs involved in the initial set up and update of such infrastructure, AWS was the one that would meet our goal of building flexible infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable price. We also found that AWS was a better option because it is widely used within the engineer community, information is widely available, and many partner companies undertaking cutting-edge research have also adopted AWS for their developmental infrastructures. (Satoko Shisai)

Junta Goto is the Group Manager of the Digital Infrastructure Group in the Digital Strategy Promotion Department and was in charge of CSI development. He highly evaluated a wealth of functions in AWS services as the following.
"Security is the most important thing to consider when thinking about cooperative use with multiple researchers and outside parties. Compared to other cloud services, AWS has a lot of security features and functions, such as log acquisition, and was found to be better in improving development productivity, as well as operational enhancement and efficiency."

They started drawing up the concepts for CSI in October of 2018, and started the project in June of 2019 after a technical Proof of Concept (PoC). Trial operation began from November of 2019, and was fully implemented from August of 2020.
CSI separates the environment for storing data and the environment for researching, and provides a dedicated environment for each research project. Their data-storage environment uses Amazon S3, while their dedicated research environments use Amazon VPC and Amazon EC2. Hiroshi Uchiyama from the Digital Infrastructure Group had this to say, "Highly confidential data such as genome data and medical information that had been stored separately by each department was merged together and safely managed."

Access was managed via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) using a number of different types of software, AWS Direct Connect, and third party SaaS connecting with AWS on closed networks. Kenichi Akamatsu from the Digital Infrastructure Group had this to say,
"With CSI, the movement of data between research environments is restricted and compliance measures are strengthened so that researchers and data scientists don't unwittingly use data from projects other than their own."

The processes that provide environments for research also allow work to be shared and automated based on the concepts of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which also results in shortened time-frames and reduced costs.
"By automating the work, we have reduced lead time for IT resources needed for cooperative research from six months down to one week. By automatically applying standardized security-related services and functions during the provisioning process, we have reduced the costs of building and implementing system environments by 90% compared to when we used a different cloud service in our company." (Junta Goto) 

After CSI was put into full use, over 20 research environments were built, and were applied to new drug research from inside and outside of the company, as well as real world data (RWD) analysis. Each research environment freely implements and uses applications deemed necessary by researchers and data scientists, libraries such as R and Python, and the like.
"Within our company, it is used first for evaluating applications and PoC, and if we see positive results, it is then used for large scale verification or is put into full use. AWS provides a very efficient infrastructure in which we can quickly get rid of applications that don't meet our needs in developing new drugs, which can be unpredictable." (Junta Goto)

With CSI, we undertook designs assuming that we will build 100 cooperative research environments with internal research applications and outside parties, such as those from academia, hospitals, drug discovery and development vendors, and IT vendors, and we currently have multiple projects lined up. In Japan, commercial online-delivery of genome data analysis results has begun with companies that are making advances in the field of biotechnology. Outside of Japan, RWD has been promptly and safely received from companies such as the Roche Group and its subsidiary Genentech, and progress has been made with cooperative research. From here on out, there are plans to expand and allow access to analytics infrastructures on AWS that is used by the likes of Roche Group and Genentech.
"Open data utilization platforms built on AWS have been attracting a great deal of attention from research partners inside and outside of Japan, and are expected to speed up cooperative research." (Satoko Shisai)
 

From here on out, Chugai Pharmaceutical plans to expand into overseas CSI development, and move its new drug discovery research and clinical development related services to the cloud. They are also looking into building a next-generation CSI that can be integrated with existing legacy systems as an in-house research environment. "The first phase is to set up infrastructure while giving priority to secure data management. The second phase is to see if it is possible to combine container technology and a variety of SaaS, and use analytical applications, data lakes, and data warehouses. We plan to turn research environments capable of AI, machine learning, and data analysis into IaC as libraries, and to develop infrastructure to enable in-house data scientists to easily access high-performance computing environments." (Junta Goto)

The core strategy of 'Chugai Digital Vision' 2030 does not stop at building infrastructure and also includes employee awareness, organizational culture, and cultural innovation, where AWS is expected to help them build a road map and realize their vision for 2030.
"We will work towards improving awareness within the company, which is still dependent on IT vendors, and take on the challenge of in-house development. I want our company to work with AWS not only with infrastructure, but also in developing human resources focused on gaining qualifications, and to transform our corporate culture into one that is innovative." (Satoko Shisai)

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