Apollo, a Unique Cloud-Based Platform, Takes Flight at Charles River

The leading-edge system breaking new ground in the contract research space offers real-time access to study data and empowers users with self-serve access to analyze their important data

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In the summer of 2020, amidst a global pandemic causing massive disruptions in the workplace, an energized team at Charles River Laboratories began meeting virtually to discuss how best to build a leading-edge cloud-based platform for drug developers. They envisioned a system that would provide easy, near real-time access to study data and milestones, as well as documents, cost estimates and time-saving program planning tools, all in a secure new product.

That platform, which is called Apollo (the reference to the moon landing is deliberate as is the connection to healthcare and medicine), launched this month. There is nothing like it in the nonclinical contract research industry today. The platform is currently supporting clients within Charles River’s growing Safety Assessment and Biologics businesses in North America and Europe. Eventually it will incorporate the Discovery Services, Microbial Solutions and Research Models and Services businesses.

“The build and deployment of Apollo is an instrumental piece of Charles River’s overall digital journey,” said Mark Mintz, Corporate Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer at Charles River. “By delivering high impact technology that gives customers greater access to data, we are enabling data-driven decision making that creates value for their businesses and reaching our goal of creating efficiencies in the drug development process.”

Apollo represents just one of a series of initiatives that demonstrate how advances in technology are helping to reshape drug development at Charles River. Last year alone, the company rolled out an AI-enabled drug discovery platform in partnership with Valo Health, a GLP-validated electronic lab notebook , and a digital product that is designed to make cell donor recruitment faster and more efficient.

But Apollo by degrees has been a complex and difficult operation, impacting thousands of Charles River employees and customers all over the world. To be successful, the system had to meet the needs of all of Charles River’s partners from the largest pharma companies through established and emerging biotechs.

The fact that most of Charles River’s sites were acquired rather than grown was also a challenge. “Our Safety Assessment business, for instance, is made up of many, many acquisitions,” says Pam Walker, CVP, Global Head of Operations at Charles River Laboratories, Safety Assessment. “Ensuring necessary data capture systems were harmonized is a constant challenge but we have made some incredible progress.”

Apollo: A tool to accelerate drug development

From the beginning, the main goal of Apollo was to help bring life-saving drugs to market faster by giving Charles River employers and customers the technology to accelerate their progress. “What we are doing here is providing earlier decision-making, earlier access to data, earlier access to visualization of that data and easier access to the people who are working on their studies,” says Pam. “We want to create collaboration between our sponsors (i.e., customers) and our employees in a much more continuous kind of way as opposed to a transactional approach.”

“In developing Apollo, Charles River took an Agile route—that is, we broke down the massive project into manageable parts. Agile has become the standard method of developing software for many businesses and is increasingly influencing the way physical products are designed and manufactured as well. But adapting to it took time,” says Erin Howard, Executive Director of Product and Design at Charles River, and the leader of the Product Owner Team responsible for Apollo.

“Because we learned Agile, we learned product development methodology and embraced a new type of technology build,” said Erin. “With that came moments when we were a bit unsure about the paths we were taking, whether that be data-related, or the scale of the project, or the number of customers we were trying to bring on next. It was a new way of working for us. It was impactful but also challenging.”

And there are more amenities to come. “Right now, the Apollo system offers a ballpark pricing tool that customers can use, but eventually the goal is to let clients design and book their own studies without having to talk to a Charles River employee if they choose,” says Kristen Eisenhauer, Corporate Senior Vice President, Sales and Client Services. "That ballpark pricing tool is turning out to be a more popular feature than we originally thought.”

Enterprise Data Hub and App Development

Building the Apollo platform began in earnest in 2021. Along with the Product Owners and App team, a separate, but linked data team, created an Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) which is a data platform that pulls and consolidates data from multiple sources. The Data Engineering team transformed the data making it “fit for purpose and built a webservices layer to serve the data to Apollo. Preparing data for Apollo in the EDH included pulling together the disparate sources of Safety Assessment data, cleansing it, and making sure it was “standardized and consumable” for the customer, said Marlo Cobb, Executive Director of Enterprise Analytics at Charles River, whose group is responsible for the Enterprise Data Hub.

Another group developed the front-end application. They built widgets to view the data so users could navigate the application and oversaw the common services such as back-end security and authentication. Teams needed to work in sync to ensure the project progressed at a consistent pace.

“The cross-collaboration is a credit to the teams because it's not a technical challenge, it's a people challenge,” said Dean McDonnell, Executive Director, Customer Experience Engineering whose group developed the app for Apollo. “At the end of the day, the hardest thing about software development and delivery is people. It may be easier to stick to your little silos and do your own thing, but the cross-collaboration is what makes us fast and flexible. That depends on really good relationships between the various teams.”

In fact, as each business is added to the Apollo platform, the process is getting faster, notes Marlo. “With that said, the recipe remains the same,” she said. “We still have to integrate the new data sources required for each of the different applications, and we have to sort through that data, doing some data profiling and some data analysis. … But we do build reusable components that absolutely will accelerate every single line of business as their digital journey begins.”

Acclimating users to Apollo

Onboarding and acclimating customers and employees to Apollo has been critical to ensuring a smooth rollout for Apollo and to completely achieved the desired business and customer outcomes. Every new platform has its own learning curve for users, so long before the system was launched an organizational change management team led by Michelle Berthiaume, Senior Director of Global Change Management, devised methods for both driving awareness and helping users learn to use Apollo, as well as providing reinforcing activities to ensure users did not default back to a legacy system or process. Although the customer centric design is intuitive, a support team is also available to assist where and when needed.

They also initialized customer success and Help Desk teams to assist customers and internal customer-facing teams with answers to questions they had about Apollo. “The more that we can arm our customer-facing staff on how to use the system and how to help customers, the higher the adoption rate will be,” says Michelle. Like most cutting-edge digital applications, the vision for Apollo will be to utilize as much “in App” learning strategies as possible.

And the more we can create an engaging experience for our customers that easily puts the information they need at their fingertips the more we together with our customers can help to create healthier lives.