The emergence of big data, as well as advancements in data science approaches and technology, is providing pharmaceutical companies with an opportunity to gain novel insights that can enhance and accelerate drug development. It will increasingly help government health agencies, payers, and providers to make decisions about such issues as drug discovery, patient access, and marketing. From our unique vantage points at Genentech, a leading biotechnology company with a major data science practice, and The Data Incubator, a data-science education company that places and trains data scientists, we have seen how the pharmaceuticals industry has leveraged big data for some potentially revolutionary advances and the challenges it has faced along the way.