Case Study: Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research achieves record-speed mining of massive biological data with Neo4j

Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research - Customer Case Study

Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, led in this project by Senior Scientist Stephan Reiling, faced the challenge of unifying massive, heterogeneous biological datasets and text-mining results to accelerate discovery of next-generation medicines. The team needed a way to search and navigate that combined data quickly and flexibly to generate actionable hypotheses.

They adopted the Neo4j graph database and Cypher queries to build a giant integrated graph, enabling rapid, ad-hoc exploration and similarity searches across compounds, annotations and diseases. The result is record-speed querying and strong performance at scale (currently ~0.5 billion relationships and growing), faster data loads using the batch importer, and promising early insights for drug development.

Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research

Stephan Reiling

Senior Scientist