Technology Focus How is Cloud Technology and Software-as-a-service Helping to Improve the
Global Challenge of Clinical Discovery? George Masoura
George Masoura is Global Vice President Sales and Marketing at ECLINSO AG. He has more than 30 years of experience in software and services used for business process improvement. His primary focus, for more than ten years, has been on software and services for clinical development and operational improvement within the life sciences community. He holds a degree in computer science. For more information, visit:
www.eclinso.com
Disclosure: George Masoura is an employee of ECLINSO AG. Correspondence:
george.masoura@
eclinso.com
Citation: iHealth Connections, 2011;1(2):124–6 Support: The publication of this article was funded by ECLINSO AG.
Status quo R&D is fast becoming obsolete. Patients, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry all want medicines that make a substantial difference in the real world. But while there has been a significant increase in the industry’s funding and understanding of biomedicine, the gap is widening between the rate of discovery and pharma’s ability to translate these findings into medicines. While global drug pipelines continue to grow by 5 % annually, development costs are growing at 10 % a year. Moreover, over the next three years, the industry faces an estimated $125 billion in lost revenues from patent expiries, with new drug launches expected to replace fewer than 40 % of the lost sales. This dwindling productivity signals the death knell for pharma’s traditional R&D paradigm of a closed, insular, compartmentalized, and sequential approach to innovation. A new approach to drug discovery is essential for the industry’s long-term viability. New integrated collaborative technologies that ‘virtualize’ the research process and accelerate clinical development are key enablers that facilitate new types of partnerships, collaborative innovation, and risk sharing. Cloud computing with software-as-a-service in its various forms is having a dramatic impact on the way life-science chief information officers provision the applications needed by their organizations to support the R&D process. Life-science research has always been a highly complex and time-consuming matter, packed full of risk and inefficiency, requiring a broad and diverse set of systems. The complexity of these specialized applications has grown to the point where many life-science companies have little or no ability to afford to build, implement, and support internally much of the required systems and infrastructure, let alone the expertise.
Collaborative R&D, and in particular open and collaborative innovation, represents an opportunity for true transformative change. For an industry that, until recently, had been used to working in silos within its own organizations, these more integrated outsourcing models will require levels of flexibility, coordination, and integration rarely seen in pharma, among a wide and diverse set of internal and external stakeholders. Yet true collaboration has the potential to improve drug-development success rates, lower costs, and shorten the 7.5–8 year development time cycle. In an effort to cut back on costly (but unproductive) in-house research, companies are beginning
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to accelerate the shift from investment in fixed assets to these more flexible partnerships with external developers.
The complex steps involved can take years of intense effort to complete, and require a variety of specialized systems and resources to support the process of capturing and managing the data being generated.
Cloud Computing has Transformational Potential Not surprisingly, as companies begin to unpick their network of internal capabilities and look for leading technologies with which to share data
© TOUCH BRIEFINGS 2011
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