Tibotec-Virco

SAS for reporting on the HIV cocktail recipe

CUSTOMER CASE

Industry Pharma

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Tibotec-Virco is a multinational biotechnology company with headquarters in Belgium and operating subsidiaries in the United States and Ireland. It was formed in March 2001 through the merger of Tibotec and Virco, who pooled their expertise in drug discovery, pharmacogenomics and molecular diagnostics. Tibotec-Virco applies the latest techniques in molecular biology, pharmacogenomics, drug discovery and development, and artificial intelligence to develop novel, new drugs and individualised disease management products, services and technologies for HIV/AIDS with the ultimate aim of enhancing and extending peoples' lives.

The Challenge

Tibotec-Virco sought a new system to house, process, and report all its information relating to HIV drug resistance testing. In particular, it was looking for a way of providing the information in a sophisticated visual format. This information is made available to doctors to determine for each patient the optimal combination of anti-HIV drugs.

The Solution

The answer was to construct a system which combined the organization of content with the development of templates. In this way, large quantities of reports could be generated, printed, sent and stored. The architecture of the system needed to be extremely versatile, given the large number of report formats and the evolution over time.

Managing enormous amounts of data

Tibotec-Virco has made huge and rapid strides forward in the discovery and development of its own drugs to combat HIV, with several drugs producing excellent results in clinical trials. However, bringing any new pharmaceutical product on to the market clearly needs adequate control, and can be a slow process.

One of the major problems in the treatment of HIV with drugs is the ability of the virus to develop resistance to the drug. This is a complex area - there are over 250 known mutations of the virus. A key element in the development of these drugs is therefore the collecting and reporting of data on resistance to HIV drugs, collected either through the results of laboratory tests, or produced through complex statistical research using previous test results. Tibotec-Virco has signed a number of agreements with major pharmaceutical companies to provide them with HIV drug resistance testing and other analytical services.

In its diagnostic services department, Tibotec-Virco tests the resistance of each patient's specific HIV type to the drugs that are currently in development or available on the market. These tests result in a report that includes drawings, matrices and color-coding in order to achieve optimal information transfer. This allows doctors to determine for each patient the optimal combination of anti-HIV drugs.

The systems used to manage these large amounts of data from different sources had grown organically with the research processes. They had their origins in small-scale research projects, and while they were ideally suited to these initial aims, the need for further improvements surfaced more recently.
Stefan Thys, ICT Projects Co-ordinator for Tibotec-Virco explains: "The lab pioneers had built an excellent system to provide support for the testing they were doing. However, as the scale and complexity of our research and the number of data sources have grown tremendously, new needs arose, especially for a more solid architecture, easier maintenance and greater flexibility. We particularly aimed at improving the scalability, and at reducing maintenance and testing time considerably."

A solid reporting achitecture, great flexibility

Once the template is defined, the report can be prepared. It collects data from the lab information repository and assigns the content to the right building block. It is then reviewed and approved. Next a report is generated in PDF format. This can then be mailed, printed, re-printed, and is archived so that it can be accessed for future reference without the need to regenerate it.

Stefan Thys points out: "We already had quite a lot of SAS in house: it has such a variety of functions. We knew SAS could provide us with the flexibility and solidity we needed in view of the very high number of report formats and the evolution over time. The system allows us to make new templates for new types of reports that might be required in a matter of hours, rather than days."

The reporting system is used intensively by some 5 users who are generating hundreds of different reports or report versions a day. Concludes Stefan Thys: "It also looks very promising for the future, as we will be able to extend the system to provide reports in other formats, such as HTML or RTF. We will also be able to incorporate a GUI tool to help define the structures of the report. This will mean we can place components using drag-and-drop techniques, and directly visualize the results. Maintenance by users will then be still easier."

Read More ...

• Visit Tibotec on the Web
• download the success story in PDF format.