An Intelligent Knowledge Platform to Accelerate Precision Medicine

The Challenge

A Fortune 200 biotechnology company faced significant challenges due to siloed information across numerous fragmented tools. Accessing and utilizing critical research data was inefficient, limiting collaboration and slowing scientific advancements. Particularly in Precision Medicine, these barriers significantly impeded productivity and innovation in INDs (investigational new drugs). INDs in trials are a key leading indicator of growth for biotech firms, and research leading to IND candidates is essential for new discoveries, such as cancer treatments. The firm had ambitious growth goals over the next five years, demanding new ways of leveraging their research capabilities & knowledge.

Highland’s Approach

Highland conducted comprehensive user research, including stakeholder interviews and collaborative experience mapping workshops, to deeply understand user needs and existing pain points. This collaborative approach yielded three primary user personas—New Network Explorers, Precision Problem Solvers, and Knowledge Integrators—and clearly articulated user needs across multiple products & platforms.

Using co-creation workshops across business functions—including technical partners—we work closely with our client to define future-state concepts, developing an intelligent, intuitive user experience focused on interconnected data, and AI capabilities already being tested. Through iterative design and strategic planning, Highland created visual interface concepts and feature matrices aligned to organizational goals and user needs. This included short term, incremental designs focused on improved UX and consistency, and longer term designs that demonstrated net new features incorporating the integration of knowledge systems, as well as emergent AI insights capabilities.

Innovative Platform Design

The resulting enterprise knowledge platform is a visionary platform designed to be intuitive, scalable, and intelligent, enabling quick, easy access to a wide array of interconnected data. The design integrates metadata, visualizations, and intelligent guidance, dramatically simplifying discovery of useful knowledge, presented in a way that is relevant and actionable, ultimately promising to enhance collaboration capabilities across the company.

The use cases for an intelligent platform were clear, with the massive amount of data available spanning dozens of knowledge centers. The forward facing, AI-enabled designs demonstrated an agentic platform that could help connect the dots between existing knowledge across the organization and current research objectives, increasing the likelihood of finding novel treatments.

We co-created a benefits-oriented roadmap for the platform, with a phased implementation of key capabilities:

• 2025 (Incremental Target): Better UI, faster data access via new architecture
• 2026 (Adjacent Target): Enhanced insights with selective AI capabilities
• 2027+ (Transformational Target): Smart, conversational, adaptive AI-enabled interactions

Outcomes & Business Impact

This unified knowledge management approach has established clear pathways for accelerated innovation, significantly reducing redundancy and enhancing cross-functional collaboration. By strategically aligning data resources with user personas' experience and business goals, the client is now positioned for optimized data utility, shared awareness, and connecting the dots between different discoveries. This ultimately supports the client's ambitious future growth, including accelerating IND innovation.