Novo Nordisk Accelerates Life-Changing Research Using Azure DevOps and GitHub

Novo Nordisk scientists collaborate extensively with external research partners (targeting 50% of early research projects by 2025), but its IT team faced a bottleneck: provisioning new environments and access for each partner took 3-6 months of manual compliance work, slowing research and preventing collaborative data analysis with outside teams. Novo Nordisk built a Research Collaboration Platform using GitHub as the code repository for sharing analytics scripts and Python/R models, with Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines automating workflows and builds while maintaining GxP regulatory compliance, in a multi-cloud, segregated setup for secure external partnerships that traces requirements, code commits, and test cases. Partner onboarding time dropped from three to six months to only several hours, contributing to new heart-failure research insights through expanded partnerships and larger datasets, along with improved partner trust and competitive advantage from the platform's security, compliance, and transparency.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud AI platform, combining Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service — the delivery channel for a large share of pharma's enterprise GPT deployments.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.