Leverage Innovation

At the Molecular Medicine Tri Conference in San Francisco, last week leaders from Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Roche and others focused on the need for external partnerships, open innovation and standards.  Chris Waller, Senior Director, Pre Competitive Collaborations, Pfizer, outlined the Pistoia Project focus on pre-competitive partner standards, open innovation amongst its members and individual projects for collaboration such as Electronic Lab Notebooks and simplifying a cross industry architecture. He noted that all members needed to ‘cross the chasm’ into early adoption by working together to understand new pharma/biotech business models. 

Susie Stephens, Director, Biomedical Informatics, Johnson and Johnson, noted how open innovation models are becoming the key way to meet the challenges that innovation require in the industry, based on models by Prof. Henry Chesborough, at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School.  She co-chairs the Semantic Web definition group at W3C, working on defining ontologies for healthcare, and drug research and development.  Ms. Stephens outlined the need for linked data across disparate systems in a company using typed records and controlled vocabularies. One of the benefits of a linked data approach was to add data repositories in an incremental way, as they can be standardized, metadata added and programming interfaces developed.  

Daniel Chin, Senior Principal Research Scientist, Roche, said a major Informatics challenge is how to retrieve all the data for a compound for scientists globally. Scientists today are feeling overwhelmed with data, but not feeling like they are getting all the insights and perspectives they could about the properties of a compound or its reactants. In research new targets are getting more complex as the ‘low hanging fruit’ in research have pretty much all been tapped. Search across databases for scientists, today is somewhat manual still. He noted the need for a knowledge management architecture across the enterprise integrated with workflow software. 

Leaders from Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Infosys presented lunch time discussions about how their products had been specifically fine tuned or developed for the needs of life sciences development and how they could solve some of the scientist productivity issues.  It was significant to see a year after last year’s conference the focus of these major information systems vendors in the Informatics market space. 

Certainly, the pharma/biotech industry is keenly tuned to issues of scientist productivity and speeding innovation.  Yet, concise scientific business problems were generally not presented during the Adopting R & D Informatics track, but more on how to implement an informatics solution to a problem already defined. In the future, Informatics professionals will likely have to make a direct link to solving a scientific business problem to obtain the resources to implement their solutions.