Informatics in Life Sciences industry

Informatics in Life Sciences is beginning to deliver on its promise of improving R&D productivity after recent years of investments. (Note: while this analysis was first shared in 2004-2005, it is still relevant today in 2007)

95 out of 100 clinical candidates fail, costing hundreds o f millions of dollars. R&D productivity is currently a key issue in the pharmaceutical industry as evidenced by a constant, or even decreasing, number of new drugs being introduced despite increasing R&D budgets.

Leading pharma companies are re-engineering Discovery and Development to address this issue. These re-engineering efforts are producing significant increases in productivity in terms of output, success rates, and cycle times.

Towards 2010, the industry expects genomics-derived drugs to start entering the market, which will provide innovative new therapies for diseases with high unmet medical need – diseases which could not be tackled by traditional technologies and approaches.

Multiple novel technologies have recently been developed to improve the analysis of genetic sequences, to rapidly assess RNA or protein levels in relevant tissues, and to validate the function of potential new drug targets. The challenge facing bio-pharmaceutical research is one of effective integration of these new technologies to improve the quality of the discovery and development pipeline.

New developments in Information Technology like Data Mining, Collaboration Tools, Wireless integration, RFID, etc. can be used to improve productivity and reduce costs. All Pharma & Healthcare organizations should leverage new Information Technologies.

A few examples:

• Adopting hand-held devices to record & transfer clinical-data.
• Using speech recognition and data-mining tools with research data to significantly improve research productivity.
• Using web based document management to simplify creation, sharing and archival of content, test results & reports.