BoxWorks 2023: Keeping life sciences innovation compliant

Life sciences companies grapple with enabling teams across geographic and digital boundaries. They’re tightly beholden to regulatory compliance while promising customers security of their data. Things get even more complicated when you consider that many life sciences organizations have evolved from having multiple on-premises applications to replicating that stack in the cloud. This creates a lot of content repositories, with fractured content opening organizations up to enormous business risk and management overhead.

These are the problems Box aims to solve. The Content Cloud is one secure, intelligent platform for both regulated and non-regulated content, enabling life sciences organizations to innovate quickly while staying compliant. Speaking of which, data and content security is profoundly important to life sciences organizations, so let’s start there. Here’s what we revealed at BoxWorks. 

Protecting critical life sciences data of all kinds

Life sciences companies tend to work at the intersection of a few compliance challenges. Clinical research and product development both involve a tremendous amount of highly sensitive IP. Patient PII is protected by critical regional and industry-specific requirements like GxP, HIPAA, and other regulations. In addition to regulatory compliance, life sciences companies have to take a strong stand against data theft. 

Some of the major security announcements from BoxWorks included:

• Box Sign compliance with GxP 21CFR Part 11 (coming soon), enabling you to receive e-signatures on regulated content, all from Box and included with your subscription
• A partnership with global security leader CrowdStrike that leverages Falcon Zero Trust device risk signals to reduce the risk of malware infiltration and data breaches 
• Box Shield ransomware protection capabilities to mitigate the ever-growing threat of malware, including a self-serve content recovery tool to restore corrupted content
• AI-powered threat detection (very soon!) will identify anomalous file activities originating from Box Drive

We’ve also granted admins greater visibility into their content landscape through improved Admin Insights and expanded retention capabilities in Box Governance, giving life sciences companies even more peace of mind over content security.

Organizing content in Box Hubs

Big news at BoxWorks for tapping into all that secure content: Box Hubs will give life sciences organizations easier ways to define team workspaces for collaboration and publishing. Box Hubs will act as sources of truth for projects and teams and can be used for things like:

• CRO workspace: Create a dedicated space for collaboration with CROs, ensuring that documentation and research can be easily shared and secured
• Quality document publishing: Leverage Box Hubs to publish final documentation related to quality management processes, ensuring only source-of-truth content is leveraged for this critical content

Box Hubs makes it easier for life sciences organizations to share and collaborate within the context of a specific team, line of business, or project. Plus, with Box AI, Box Hubs becomes even more powerful. Keep reading to see how.

Make everyone in your organization smarter with Box AI

At BoxWorks, we announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate the most advanced AI models right into the Content Cloud. For life sciences, Box AI will augment major unstructured data processes across organizations in many ways. For example:

• Drug research support: Extract and summarize precise information from research notes and scientific articles
• CRO collaboration: When working with CROs, leverage Box AI to quickly summarize clinical study protocols, study criteria, and results
• Regulatory engagement: Leverage Box AI in Box Notes to draft responses and summaries for healthcare authority communications
• Promo material distribution: Leverage Box AI in Hubs to understand new products and speed the route to market for sales teams

The partnership with OpenAI is just the beginning for Box, which is ultimately a platform-neutral content-management platform. Box AI will enable life sciences organizations to improve productivity while cutting cost and complexity.

Allucent and FibroGen drive innovation with compliance in mind

Samir Kothari is VP, Information Technology at Allucent, a midsized contract research organization focused on clinical trials. Parag Govil is Head of IT for FibroGen, a biopharmaceutical company developing products at the cutting edge of oncology. These two IT leaders have one major thing in common: the pressure to keep their organizations compliant in a heavily regulated environment without constraining innovation.

After patient safety, staying compliant is the first priority to Allucent, FibroGen, and just about every other life sciences company. Box customers agree that staying compliant shouldn’t hold back innovation, but should in fact, improve it. That’s why they rely on platforms like Box.

In a panel moderated by Box Life Sciences Director Manu Vohra, Kothari spoke of how an organization without endless IT resources has to “partner with leading enterprise vendors that can offer us the assurances of being able to operate in a controlled environment while we meet our strategic goals.”

Govil said, “I’m looking for partners who understand life sciences, biotech, and, specifically, GxP regulations to ensure that we can innovate at a faster pace.”

AI is also a big question for these tech leaders, and amongst all the hype of the new technologies available, they’re figuring out how best to leverage AI in the context of highly sensitive data, and how to do so quickly. For Allucent and FibroGen, AI will enable faster content summarization, authoring, and the automation of creation of certain clinical trial documents, among other processes.

A single platform for all life sciences content

For life sciences organizations that might have 100 on-premises applications and 1,000 online, each of those applications creates yet another data silo where information gets dispersed and fragmented. This is a costly model for any organization, and it also creates major security vulnerabilities and productivity drains.

The Content Cloud lets you store content in one single place while intelligently powering work across any life sciences enterprise. Box CIO Aaron Levie phrased it well in the BoxWorks fireside chat: “As the Content Cloud, we want to intelligently power the full content lifecycle in a single platform, from the moment we ingest data to how we secure it and classify it, ultimately enabling workflow automation, data publishing, e-signature, governance, and insights.” 

To learn more, visit our Box for Life sciences page.