Trace Id is missing
November 14, 2023

Novo Nordisk accelerates life-changing research using Azure DevOps and GitHub

Novo Nordisk scientists and engineers work at the frontiers of discovery to defeat serious chronic diseases. The researchers frequently collaborate with external teams. For every new Novo Nordisk partner, the IT team had to provide new environments and access. Novo Nordisk built a delivery platform to deploy its research collaboration platform in a multi-cloud setup on top of GitHub with integration from Azure DevOps.

Novo Nordisk

“We’re early in our research collaboration platform (RCP) journey, but we’re already able to bring scientific innovation across different clinical and academic partners.”

Ramneek Gupta, Digital Director in Global Drug Discovery in Novo Nordisk Research and Early Development, Novo Nordisk

Opportunity for innovation

Novo Nordisk scientists and engineers work at the frontiers of discovery to achieve their ultimate goal: defeating serious chronic diseases. The company’s researchers frequently collaborate with external teams, tracking as many as 50 million patients. They also work with a pharmaceutical value chain, enabling them to get Novo Nordisk innovative treatments and devices into the hands of patients who need them safely and efficiently.

"Our goal is to have 50 percent of our early research projects involve external partnerships by 2025,” says Ramneek Gupta, Digital Director in Global Drug Discovery in Novo Nordisk Research and Early Development. “Given the complexity of the disease areas, defining the next therapies will require scientific innovation. We want to tap into an ecosystem of the world’s best minds, best scientific ideas, and best technologies in a joint endeavor across ourselves and our partner organizations.”

The IT team was challenged to accommodate the ambition and scale of this plan. For every new Novo Nordisk partner, the IT team had to provide new environments and access and follow compliance regulations. This manual, time-consuming effort slowed research productivity and decreased efficiency. More importantly, it constrained Novo Nordisk’s ability to look at patient data holistically. This ran counter to the company’s patient-centric dedication to pioneering scientific breakthroughs that can expand access to its medicines and help drive efforts to prevent and ultimately cure disease.  

“We weren’t able to engage with partners on the data analysis front, putting our collaborations at risk,” Gupta says. “We needed a platform that would enable us to jointly analyze the data.”

Søren Moos, IT Advisor Director, worked closely with Gupta to define the business needs and assess the feasibility of a new collaborative solution. “Building a collaboration platform within Novo Nordisk is a paradigm shift,” Moos says, “Especially given the levels of security, data segregation, and collaboration we wanted to achieve.” With Moos championing the project to the right steering committee, stakeholders, IT, and upper management, the two advocates secured the funding. 

A collaborative platform

Project technical lead Roshan Thomas Mathew, Cloud Engineer and Lead for High Performance Computing (HPC), started with the data analysis requirements to define the research collaboration platform (RCP). Researchers for Novo Nordisk were already using GitHub to share analytics scripts and code. Mathew’s partner in technical development, Casper Nielsen, Operations and Site Reliability Engineering Capability Lead, had been working with his team to enhance Microsoft Azure DevOps to manage implementation and automate the build processes. Together with their teams, the duo built the delivery mechanism, the good-practice-enabled (GxP) workflow automation, on top of Azure DevOps. It uses the Azure DevOps API and components, all while adhering to regulatory compliance requirements. Achieving the fast, compliant delivery of the solution is a major benefit of teaming with Microsoft.

The researchers use GitHub to share their code, Python, or R models that analyze the datasets. Azure DevOps with Azure Pipelines allows research teams to upload their analytical models and methodologies as a code. This leads to continually updated research thesis models, together with updated pictures of what has been found and product standards directly from Novo Nordisk. Developers can build easier, collaborate better, and deploy code faster on this seamless, secure, and flexible development platform. 

For Novo Nordisk, choosing Azure DevOps to support the workflow was a given. The biggest driver was the traceability the organization gains from having risk management and product lifecycle activities as requirement specifications alongside its engineering product backlog Items (PBIs). Linking requirements, engineering activities with code commits, and test cases, gives Novo Nordisk full control of the engineering process. Azure DevOps allows Novo Nordisk to document and enforce the control and structure needed to follow good-practice-enabled (GxP) workflows while GitHub offers the autonomy that researchers expect when building their models and testing their hypotheses through coding activities. 

RCP leverages GitHub Advanced Security on Azure DevOps to support the workflow of delivering the automatic compliance documentation tool. This combination enabled the team to build and deliver an agile, quality product in a short time. Novo Nordisk quality assurance took part early in the process to ensure regulatory requirements were understood and met, incorporating the right controls from the beginning. Although meeting regulatory requirements is not critical for some collaborations, Novo Nordisk chose strict adherence within the delivery platform so there would be no obstacles for further expansion of the platform. 

“The platform is external facing—it’s built outside Novo Nordisk,” Mathew says. “That gives us flexibility to deploy an instance of the entire suite for a project, and our partners as much freedom as they need while we segregate the resources.” Nielsen adds, “RCP exists as multiple platforms around the world where the data needs to reside locally. There is also the security and governance advantage of using RCP, a self-contained, isolated setup. It would not expose any other platform at Novo Nordisk in the highly unlikely event of a breach.”

Wide-ranging impact

With RCP still growing its scope at Novo Nordisk, the benefits are already remarkable. Even though Novo Nordisk is conducting business in a highly regulated sector, the organization can deliver engineering activities and product development at a faster pace than it did in the past. The time to bring on new independent research teams has decreased from three to six months to only several hours. 

RCP can unlock synergies in a partnership or a consortium in methods development, biological analysis, and shared data science learning. For example, Novo Nordisk has already been able to reach new insights into heart failure research by working with more partners and larger data sources. As Gupta says, “We’re early in our RCP journey, but we’re already able to bring scientific innovation across different clinical and academic partners.”

RCP has reduced the time and effort required to set up and run segregated data and analytics projects, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. The ability to quickly share standard practices has also led to much better support for research teams. As a segregated platform, RCP is not subject to extraneous IT layers that tend to be present in a large enterprise environment. RCP demonstrates Novo Nordisk's commitment to data security and compliance, as well as its openness and transparency, leading to improved trust and reputation among external partners. And RCP positions Novo Nordisk as a preferred scientific partner, with a unique and attractive value proposition, leading to competitive advantage and differentiation in the market.

Novo Nordisk is developing a new automated workflow tool as part of developing new projects, as well as building out GitHub Copilot integration to decrease repetitive research and engineering tasks. The company is cooperating with universities to improve RCP and provide even more functions to the researchers. Having a comprehensive picture of data allows Novo Nordisk to track comorbid factors in health conditions much more accurately. 

Novo Nordisk looks to continue developing more tools for researchers to do early drug discovery and to being a breeding ground for modern capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). It intends to innovate and mature the platform, emphasizing self-service options and allowing researchers to configure it so they can bring their own models, applications, and concepts—and set the standard for other collaborative partnerships. 

RCP is transforming Novo Nordisk into a technology producer and innovator, making it an exciting workplace for people looking to make a difference and powering potentially lifesaving discoveries. 

Find out more about Novo Nordisk on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Defining the next therapies will require scientific innovation. We want to tap into an ecosystem of the world’s best minds, best scientific ideas, and best technologies across ourselves and all partner organizations.”

Ramneek Gupta, Digital Director in Global Drug Discovery in Novo Nordisk Research and Early Development, Novo Nordisk

Take the next step

Fuel innovation with Microsoft

Talk to an expert about custom solutions

Let us help you create customized solutions and achieve your unique business goals.

Drive results with proven solutions

Achieve more with the products and solutions that helped our customers reach their goals.

Follow Microsoft