MedinCell gives pharmaceutical researchers a secure collaboration workspace with Mattermost

“Whether it’s the IT department discussing troubleshooting steps to resolve a problem faster, or a private channel of friends organizing a birthday celebration, the usability and ease of access makes Mattermost our go-to messaging tool at MedinCell.”
Kyle Kingsley IT Manager, MedinCell

Highlights

  • Centralized IT systems admin with integrations with tools like Jira
  • Supports over 200 users on over 1000 channels
  • Seamlessly transitioned their organization to remote work while keeping teams connected

MedinCell is a pharmaceutical company, headquartered in Montpellier, France. The company aims to make better medicine for all with its unique research and innovation combined with a business model that focuses on collaboration. MedinCell has developed a technology for long-acting injectable drugs to ensure the optimal therapeutic dose is delivered over the course of days, weeks, or months. This ensures patients comply with a treatment’s regimen, currently a major issue in many therapeutic areas.

The MedinCell mission — Better Medicine for All — focuses on global availability and inclusion. Partnerships and collaboration are pillars of this mission. To ensure access, MedinCell works with both for-profit and nonprofit organizations in collaboration with other pharmaceutical companies, physicians, academic institutions, and foundations. Collaboration is central to everything they do, and Mattermost is a key component in how they accomplish their mission.

Connecting development teams

Mattermost is deployed company-wide at MedinCell for internal communications. Each project has a dedicated channel with a cross-functional team from each department. Drug development is a highly collaborative process, and teams use Mattermost to confer on results, solve problems, and provide status updates. The complete, searchable message history makes it easy for team members to track conversations and easily find information. Decisions are made more quickly, and sharing knowledge about the development of products is more efficient.

MedinCell uses Mattermost to help employees stay connected socially as well. Many channels are dedicated to non-work topics so employees can discuss shared interests, hobbies, and even organize birthday celebrations.

The Mattermost platform at MedinCell has nearly 200 users and over 75% of them are active daily. To date, the company has created 1,033 channels and posted over 2 million messages. Mattermost is so tightly integrated into how the team works that — when remote work became mandatory due to the pandemic — the transition was relatively easy with almost no disruption.

Effective security controls

Like others in the pharmaceutical industry, MedinCell takes security very seriously. The ability to self-host Mattermost in their own data center was a critical factor in selecting the platform. MedinCell employees can share information with complete control over their own data, giving them full confidence that sensitive data is being protected.

Keeping the infrastructure running

Mattermost is central to both IT systems administration and supporting the efficient use of R&D equipment. The MedinCell research lab supports complex equipment that is shared across teams. Sophisticated hardware and software research systems need to be available and efficiently shared. Mattermost is used to update the teams on equipment status and notify personnel to fix problems quickly when they arise.

The IT department relies heavily on Mattermost to track issues, resolve incidents, and communicate status. Employees can post issues to a central channel and receive fast responses and timely updates.

Integrations are an important part of the MedinCell collaboration strategy. The IT ticketing system is integrated with Jira to automatically create and start tracking every issue. Any user can also launch a Zoom video conference for everyone in a channel with a single click or slash command.

Next steps for MedinCell

As an open source product, Mattermost is highly aligned with the MedinCell philosophy of creating value and sharing it with everybody. As their usage continues to expand, the company plans to incorporate additional integrations and in the future look to incorporate Incident Collaboration and playbooks for more complex workflows. Shared Channels are also being evaluated as a way to securely increase collaboration with the many partners they work with.