Research Intelligence
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Using Metrics to Drive Pharma Collaboration Management with Research Intelligence
By Nick Encina / February 14th, 2012 / (0) commentsPharmaceutical companies continue to outsource drug discovery, distributing risk, cost, and opportunity in R&D (see this previous post). It is a movement from centralized to distributed; from concrete to virtual; from fixed cost infrastructure to a variablized model where pharma increasingly farms out discrete research tasks while looking externally for new assets to acquire. This is an evolutionary path in drug discovery that learns from past experience and aligns corporate operations with the industry’s environmental conditions. Figure 1. Evolution of pharmaceutical R&D strategy This evolution is necessary because markets aren’t static, and companies need to transform themselves into entities positioned to compete in a changing landscape. And in our industry’s case, that changing landscape is one directed toward a model of distributed research and global cooperation. A problem with this model is that there is no standard technical solution for effectively managing relationships with diverse partners and for absorbing and making decisions based on the data from so many...
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Marshaling Pharma R&D: Distributing Risk, Cost, and Opportunity in an Outsourced World
By Nick Encina / November 29th, 2011 / (0) commentsPharmaceutical companies face extreme revenue pressure from the combined impact of expiring patents and generic drug competition, all while their pipeline for new blockbuster products looks uncertain. The dreaded pharmaceutical “patent cliff” (a.k.a. Pharmageddon) will create an estimated $250 billion in revenue loss between now and 2015 (see Figures 1 & 2). It’s unclear how that gap will be filled. Furthermore, the costs and risks to discovering new drugs is increasing, driven by increasingly complex and costly regulatory approval processes and by a need to invest in more complicated targets and therapies. In addition, mergers in the healthcare industry have created powerful payers that can manipulate treatments through co-pay incentives (and disincentives), thereby strongly affecting the returns on pharma R&D investments. These powerful, convergent forces are driving the drug discovery industry to rethink and retool many traditional business practices. Unfortunately, the entrenched tools and technologies are not ready to effectively support these improvements. Figure 1. Aggregate value of the expiring...
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Beyond the PDF
By The Wingu Team / April 8th, 2011 / (0) commentsBack in January we were fortunate to be invited to the Beyond the PDF conference at UCSD, hosted by Phil Bourne and Anita de Waard. The conference mandate was to explore ways of supporting scientific discovery and publications beyond the rigid boundaries of flat PDF files. To our pleasant surprise we were asked [last minute] to present. But that’s ok – we’re up to the challenge (gulp)! So we had our very own stand up improv moment. The video can be seen here. Share on Facebook // Share|
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Books – The Fourth Paradigm
By The Wingu Team / November 1st, 2010 / (0) commentsHere’s an interesting book on amazon we’re reading right now: The Fourth Paradigm. The description from the publisher: This book presents the first broad look at the rapidly emerging field of data-intensive science, with the goal of influencing the worldwide scientific and computing research communities and inspiring the next generation of scientists. Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets. The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud-computing technologies. This collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized. We strongly believe that enabling researchers to access data world wide through the web and providing the computing power necessary...
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Hello world!
By The Wingu Team / September 24th, 2010 / (0) commentsOur mission is to accelerate the pace of science by making data useful, relevant, timely and shareable. We believe that the way to do that is to transform technology from a gateway to a catalyst, and in the process enhance the way that scientists think about information. In our past lives we helped sequence the human genome, ran groups at academic institutes, built and managed informatics platforms for pharmaceutical companies, and participated in large government initiatives to transfer and analyze data. Then we delved in the Web2.0 space by creating successful companies in the area of semantic medical search and social networks. Now we are bringing all of these practices into a new paradigm for managing scientific data: Science as a Service. Countless articles talk about the benefits of cloud computing for research so we won’t recap them here, but it is certainly worth considering the benefits of eliminating the burdens of software management from the challenges of discovering new treatments...
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