Sr Data Scientist - Biomedical & Patent Literature

About AbbVie

AbbVie’s mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people’s lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women’s health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Position Overview:

AbbVie’s global Information Research (IR) group has a mission to unlock information that makes cures possible. Within IR, the AbbVie Library Information Science (LIS) team builds tools and provides services that help AbbVie scientists interact with, manage, and consume knowledge from scientific literature and other sources to foster innovation in drug discovery and development. LIS is a global organization, with a presence at the Lake County, Illinois headquarters, Boston, MA and Irvine, CA areas (US) and the Ludwigshafen site (Germany). We leverage leading technologies and methods to provide AbbVie scientists with our industry’s best capabilities around literature-based knowledge discovery. Our team has the scientific and technical competence to use a very large number of knowledge sources to provide high quality answers to our customers.

This Biomedical Literature / Patent Data Scientist role will be part of the Literature-based Scientific Discovery (LSD) team that is the LIS “Business Partner” for AbbVie’s Research groups. The global LSD-R team supports Technology and Therapeutic Area teams in Discovery and Development Sciences in finding, (text and data) mining, and analyzing published knowledge from literature, patents and other sources and building innovative publication data science solutions. LSD-R supports building key capabilities for Research scientist as part of AbbVie’s R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH) and other Convergence initiatives. The Literature / Patent Data Scientist should have a sufficiently strong scientific and technical background and information resource knowledge to scope and fulfill these LSD-R services. Additionally, the Literature / Patent Data Scientist will effectively collaborate across LIS and other IR teams to deliver impactful LSD services and innovative solutions to our AbbVie’s research teams. The role will help build new analytical capabilities and value-add tools for target evaluation and lead compound discovery leveraging the variety of biomedical data from ARCH databases & knowledge graph as well as generating new data and insights based on publication mining.

Key Responsibilities:

• Leverage scientific domain and technical knowledge to support AbbVie scientists’ with identifying most relevant information, published knowledge as well as decision-making in R&D projects and deliver customer specific search & analysis solutions. Key focus: Target evaluation (identification, validation, prioritization) and Lead discovery support.
• Use ontology-based text data mining, scientific data analytics, APIs, and other tools to drive end-user engagement, improved R&D efficiencies, and reveal new discovery opportunities across therapeutic focus areas.
• Provide unique scientific insights and expertise by designing and developing solutions for finding, extracting, curating, and visualizing knowledge from scientific publications, with focus on literature and patent analysis, and combining this data with other relevant structured biomedical data.
• Be a trusted partner of AbbVie’s scientific communities in Knowledge Discovery Projects. Fill role as key LSD business partner for (Immuno-)Oncology teams.
• Collaborate with internal data scientists, information scientists and software developers to design and implement LSD-tailored solutions to meet well-defined stakeholder requirements with focus on early research.
• Monitor continuously newest technology trends relevant for publication analysis and knowledge discovery and establish an external presence through conferences and publications
• Achieve great results while overwhelmingly demonstrating key AbbVie values and behaviors.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree with 6 years’ experience; Master’s Degree with 5 years’ experience; PhD with 0 years’ experience.
• Solid biomedical knowledge and ability to translate complex scientific questions from research scientists into information solutions. Good basic scientific understanding of key focus areas (Oncology or Immunology) and interest to develop deeper knowledge desired.
• Solid programming and informatics/data science/computer science background: Proficiency in Python required. Ability to understand and modify existing code as well as develop new scripts and set up new data processing workflows.
• Experience using relational databases and SQL, basic understanding of knowledge graphs, Cypher language and graph databases (neo4j) would be an additional asset.
• Experience with biomedical information resources (e.g. PubMed), literature and/or patent research, information analysis and data normalization is mandatory, advanced knowledge on patent analysis is a plus. Experience in text mining, natural language processing, semantic enrichment, ontologies, data mining or machine learning/AI is a plus.
• Familiarity with early drug discovery process (target evaluation, pathway analysis or lead compound discovery) or prior experience in pharmaceutical early research is huge plus.
• Strong analytical skills to process, analyze, visualize, and present results. Knowledge of technologies for data analysis and visualization of complex data (e.g. Rest APIs, XML, JSON, KNIME, or Spotfire) as well as knowledge of public domain standard biomedical terminologies (e.g. MeSH, NCIt, HGNC, MedDRA) is desirable.
• Systematic problem-solving, quick learner and superior attention to detail in developing tailored solutions, high degree of reliability and integrity.
• Demonstrates an interest in working collaboratively, cross-functionally, and in inter-disciplinary teams with an ability to effectively communicate, both verbally and in writing to scientists and non-scientists.
• Well-organized and balances taking direction from others (sponsors, partners, clients) with taking initiative to manage multiple projects and learning responsibilities.
• Innate scientific curiosity, technical creativity, and innovative thinking, motivated to break new ground in the field of information/literature analysis and knowledge discovery.
• Fluency in English.

Additional Information:

AbbVie is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer: At AbbVie, we value bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds to develop new and innovative solutions for patients. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

AbbVie is an equal opportunity employer including disability/vets. It is AbbVie’s policy to employ qualified persons of the greatest ability without discrimination against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, status as a disabled veteran, recently separated veteran, Armed Forces service medal veteran or active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran or a person’s relationship or association with a protected veteran, including spouses and other family members, or any other protected group status. We will take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment qualified minorities, women, individuals with a disability, disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, Armed Forces service medal veterans or active-duty wartime or campaign badge veterans. The Affirmative Action Plan is available for viewing in the Human Resources office during regular business hours.