Drug Discovery - Looking Outward: Content as a Service Starts to Make Sense

Author:

Adam Sherlock is Director, Regulatory Solutions Group at CSC Life Sciences

The pharmaceutical industry has shifted its gaze from inside to outside. Driven by declining research and development (R&D) productivity and a difficult global economic environment, companies that once did everything in-house are now collaborating extensively to stimulate discovery and at the same time, are turning to external partners as a way to reduce costs.

The pressure is on pharmaceutical leaders to take cost out of the operation, and that means no more investments in custom-built information technology (IT) systems that are costly to maintain but confer no ompetitive advantage. The need to move away from bespoke, in-house solutions is all the more pronounced given the importance of being able to share data with partners: academic institutions, hospitals, small biotech firms, contract research organisations, and even other large pharma companies.

Even internally, sharing information across departments has been challenging to date, and with the emphasis on improving the flow from discovery to submission, to manufacturingand marketing and back to discovery, having a single platform to update, create and share content is all the more important.

The question for industry has been how best to achieve that single platform while ensuring that each company’s highly valuable intellectual property remains safe. Read full article