Innovation at Norstella often begins with a question: What if we could move faster—without sacrificing quality or compliance? During a recent hackathon, Norstella’s commercial and product teams had a chance to answer that question firsthand and help us drive our mission of improving patient access to lifesaving therapies across the drug development cycle by using Replit, an AI-powered collaborative development environment that enables rapid prototyping, live collaboration, and real-time deployment of applications.
In the two-day hackathon event, Norstella teams built working prototypes that might otherwise have taken weeks—tools that enhance decision-making and bring new data-driven insights to life. From improving field sales engagement to matching patients to clinical trials, the hackathon showcased how AI-assisted “vibe coding” can reshape how products are imagined, built, and shared for early market validation. Following the hackathon, teams are generating additional value by utilizing Replit over conventional methods.
Building faster, smarter tools with Replit
Norstella’s product and other interdisciplinary teams are using Replit to accelerate ideation.
“Using Replit, we turned fragmented, reactive planning into proactive, data-driven engagement,” said Pedro Silva, Senior Director of Product at MMIT, a Norstella brand. “Replit allowed me to easily create and demonstrate our vision to senior leadership during the hackathon with minimal disruption to our daily work. Going forward, this will reshape how I prototype data tools: faster validation, quicker pivots, and a more inclusive build process across non-technical stakeholders.”
Making innovation tangible
While some teams are focused on internal efficiencies, others focused on improving the user experience. During the hackathon, Neal Curtis, Product Manager at Citeline, a Norstella brand, helped lead the team behind Citeline TrialMatch, an AI-powered platform that helps patients find clinical trials suited to their health profiles.
“Replit helped us convey the full value of TrialMatch,” Curtis said. “The platform’s impact hinges on how it feels to use—the clarity of the interface, the speed of matching, the simplicity of syncing EMR data. Replit gave us a live, working prototype that let stakeholders experience the idea, not just hear about it.”
That immediacy helped the project gain traction. “Replit cut our prototyping time and cost in half, if not more,” Curtis explained. “We built the prototype ourselves, in real-time, without waiting on handoffs or burning budget. That speed translated directly into impact—we were able to socialize the idea with internal stakeholders earlier, and those conversations helped us move faster into architecture planning.”
Chuck Flores, Director, Product & User Experience at The Dedham Group, also a Norstella brand, used Replit to enhance Pulse Analytics, a suite of data tools that accelerate market access. “Using Replit transformed how we approach idea generation and concept validation,” he said. “Instead of waiting days, we can spin up interactive workflows in just a few hours.”
Accelerating the future of collaboration
Across all four projects, one theme is clear: Replit not only makes coding faster—it makes innovation more accessible. Teams could test, iterate, and validate ideas collaboratively, without traditional handoff delays or resource barriers, helping teams to build products more quickly and efficiently.
With Replit, Norstella teams can turn ideas into working applications, getting products to customers faster and redefining what’s possible when AI, collaboration, and creativity come together.