BraiNN queries

A tech team at Novo Nordisk set out to discover how valuable research knowledge throughout the organisation could be collected and accessed with a few clicks. Their solution was to construct a BraiNN.

Even the world’s leading companies can find it challenging to keep everything in sync. Being a global organisation spanning multiple time zones with research sites in China, Denmark, the UK, North America, and India, how does Novo Nordisk ensure that every employee can be up to date with the latest research? And how is it possible to facilitate easy access to research data, to make the newest data available in real-time, and make it accessible in formats that everyone can understand?

Well, the answer is BraiNN; an internal Novo Nordisk application that provides a comprehensive and easily interpretable overview of research and target discovery data from both internal and external data sources on a given drug target.

Not even PowerPoint can deter the prepared mind

On the surface, it may sound simple. BraiNN is a website; you can sign in from any device, you just need a browser and an internet connection. The decision to build a website, rather than a native app, was made because from a developer's point of view, it was easier to develop, easier to keep updated – and anyone from across the entire organisation can use it even without any prerequisite knowledge.

However, behind the user-friendly interface of BraiNN, a lot of work has been put into designing an intelligent data collection system that can incorporate everything from APIs, databases, data lake to parquet files, and PowerPoints. And we're speaking about a vast amount of data.

A democratised application

BraiNN was created with the ambition of building a solution that could support the continued growth of Novo Nordisk by easing the daily work of researchers – existing and future – enabling them to work better, faster, and more collaboratively.

“Basically, our starting point for this whole project was that there was no place to access our shared knowledge. So, we kind of set out to say, how could we reimagine how we support target research initiatives and connect the efforts of multiple global sites into one pipeline?”

– Michael Ilvig, Design Lead, BraiNN

To get it right, the team put a strong emphasis on laying the right foundation. They knew that similar projects hadn't been just right, so through interviews, user profiling, and feedback they gathered a broad understanding of the users and their needs. This enabled them to create an application with a clear concept and direction. It is now a living central repository for internal and external state-of-the-art research into different drug targets, but also a place where researchers can easily share their newest data and make specific requests. The project further benefitted – and still benefits – from having a Product Owner embedded in the Research organisation – ensuring that BraiNN continuously adapts to meet the business needs.

The sauciness of graph databases

The tech applied in building BraiNN is a combination of coding languages chosen for their functionality. Vue.js is used in the visual front-end part, written with TypeScript, and it's linked with the backend in a classic Rest API setup that serves data from the back-end to the front-end. The backend is written in Python, and it was chosen due to its familiarity to many of the users – the researchers who use Python for their database work. It gets more interesting with the data layer underneath:

“There is a graph database, which is like the secret sauce of our application. Usually, you would use a relational database. But we have chosen a graph database, because it aligns very well with the ontology of human biology that we are creating from all these different data sources. And a graph is a really good abstraction to do that. Then of course, everything is in the cloud and most of it is serverless. We use AWS as our cloud provider in this project.”

Thomas Jensen, Tech Lead, BraiNN.

The Social Network

That common understanding, between the tech team and the researchers, in creating an application that is generally usable by all, is probably one of BraiNN’s strongest points. Users across Novo Nordisk see the benefits of having easy access to all the data in the application, and they are now ensuring that their latest work gets submitted and uploaded. Another useful benefit is how BraiNN shows connections between researchers:

“In the beginning, we were pushing the application, but now it's more like a pull. People are happy to annotate their data because they know it would easily end up in BraiNN. And then, there are the connections. In the context you're interested, you can find the community, find all the information that the community is talking about, but also all the connections – the people who you can interact with”

Jörn Petersen, Data Scientist, BraiNN.

A bit like a social network but for scientists, it shows who is working on what, and with whom. That’s the BraiNN.