Data warehouse design for pharmaceutical drug discovery research

Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars annually on drug discovery research. In the process, they generate vast amounts of scientific data. Data warehousing could significantly shorten the research cycle that leads to a new drug. We propose a framework for the application of data warehousing to integrate a pharmaceutical company´s drug discovery data. We provide an analysis of the principal activities involved in drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, and a set of questions from which potential queries can be derived. This information is used to identify fact and dimension tables, and a dimensional data model for a drug discovery data warehouse is proposed