Designing and Building an Internal Database at AGADA Biosciences

Abstract

This report keeps track of the author’s internship at AGADA Biosciences in Halifax, Nova Scotia. AGADA Biosciences is a company who specializes in performing pre-clinical studies using murine models. They focus on facilitating orphan drug development for industry, nonprofits, and academic-based groups. During the internship period, the author was assigned a role as software developer to design and build an internal database for AGADA Biosciences with the purpose of efficiently retrieving data from the database. Tasks performed by the author were managing data, designing database models, recommending information systems, building the database, installing and implementing systems, and reporting on progress. This internship is highly related to the Health Informatics program. Knowledge learned from Health Informatics can be applied to all of the required tasks. Most of the problems, such as vague requirements,data quality issues, and time conflicts during the project can be solved with Health Informatics solutions such as drawing ERD and BPMN diagrams. Objectives were met by the end of the internship. The author also learned how to put Health Informatics knowledge into practice and present results to employers. In addition, the author experienced teamwork, working with database management systems, and data processing. Several recommendations are made for the future works.