useR! 2024

Pharmaceutical industry programming has for many years been characterized by "one programming language - take it or leave it". This is reflected in persistent use of established standard programs and closed source languages, due to their prevalence within the field.
However, the transition to open source is well underway and the advantages of using modern languages, such as R, are becoming more common and accepted. Programming of datasets for large clinical trials in R greatly benefits from using i) modern, scalable infrastructure; ii) large speed gains from parallelization paired with new file formats; iii) integrated version control, and iv) DevOps solutions, just to name a few advantages. The nature of open source itself enables tapping into community solutions, e.g. the pharmaverse packages, and, in return, contributing to them with internally developed code.
This presentation will outline the challenges we have been facing while transitioning to R in Novo Nordisk, the expected and often unexpected gains resulting from that change and the direction, in our opinion, that clinical trial programming is headed towards.