Leverage Innovation

Based on comments by a diverse set of Pharma/Biotech industry leaders at last weeks’ Molecular Medicine Tri Conference in San Francisco, there is an emerging interest in developing consortia or one-on-one partnerships to share information about IT frameworks, systems, networks, best practices, vendor selection criteria, open source software, collaborative discovery services and other tools that will reduce costs and accelerate development time.  

Leaders from Merck, Eli Lilly, Astra-Zeneca, and the National Cancer Institute all shared examples of one-on-one or consortia that they are setting up to facilitate collaboration in pre-competitive innovation spaces to jump start their discovery and informatics processes supporting research and development.

One intriguing announcement was made by keynote speaker, Jay Tenenbaum, with the introduction of the CollabRX collaborative network of academic researchers, pharma companies, biotechs, clinical providers, physicians and patients and others focused on orphan or rare diseases. For research there is a service to develop a community of researchers focused on a specific research goal, for patients services related to personalized medicine, and for physicians a service is offered to analyze different treatment options. This collaborative ecosystem offers a look into the future of how networked healthcare professionals can work together to solve unmet medical needs and reduce costs while speeding up development time. 

Just recently, Paul Stoffels, Head of R & D for Johnson & Johnson was interviewed in the WSJ Health Blog (Jan 29 09), about the future of research and develoment for drug discovery.  He said that in the future he would not rely on just internal resources that medicines are too complex to build these days and development will focus on “building networks where together with a number of different groups you come up with solutions to solve medical needs.” 

This pre-competitive innovation space is fast emerging, and offers real benefits in meeting the challenge we posed earlier about how to meet the challenge of healthcare productivity and reduce costs while increasing the quality of patient services.  We will continue to monitor this pre-competitive space for developments.