Pharmaceutical Industry driving R&D technologies

Graham Jackson, discusses how the “Internet revolution” saw many businesses moving away from traditional R&D practices in order to be first to market and reap the wealth of rewards on offer - and how this approach was sure to fail. In comparison, the Pharmaceutical industry remained focused and identified solid technologies out of the plethora available that resulted in saved R&D time, money and resources. The outcome is that Content Management (CM) technologies have empowered innovation within the Pharmaceutical industry and shortened the all-essential cycle of evaluation - whilst inadvertently setting the criteria for intelligent search and retrieval tools.




In the 1990’s the “Internet revolution” accelerated innovation and businesses started to work in “Internet time”, adopting a “build it and they will come” attitude. The pressure was on to bring products to market quicker than ever before in order to keep ahead of competition. As a result traditional R&D practices were put on the back burner. It was ignored that R&D is the idea engine, the generator of innovation and key to the success or failure of a company. The lack of importance placed on R&D at this time was subsequently reflected in the number of companies and technologies that disappeared as fast as they had appeared in the late 1990s.

Now we are experiencing a snap-back to traditional paradigms, an increased focus on R&D to ensure that market demands are met and that companies can effectively predict what the marketplace desires - whilst continuing to innovate. One industry that could never afford to change its R&D practices so radically is the pharmaceutical industry. Despite many dot.com health enterprises collapsing or experiencing difficulties as the business models they pursued proved unsustainable, traditional healthcare business models have proved robust. For these companies the Internet and technology has simply increased R&D momentum, with the key being the management of a companies intellectual property. By embracing Content Management as an efficient method to access, analyse and collaborate information, the Pharmaceutical industry is successfully innovating in a highly competitive market by reducing time, money and resources spent during the R&D process to enable a significantly reduced time to market.

In the Pharmaceutical industry the need to be first to market for any given drug is enormous. Drugs can take many years to develop, test and achieve government sign off before marketing and sales activities can commence. By using CM to help streamline the process even relatively small gains in time to market of 1% or 2% translates into a drug appearing many weeks or even months ahead of traditional schedules. We need only look at how much revenue Bayer receives each week from selling Aspirin to understand the benefit of releasing a drug early and confirm just how acute the link between CM efficiency, productivity and revenue for most Pharmaceutical companies really is.

Surely any pharmaceutical company not taking a serious interest in CM tools and policies is committing commercial suicide? Next to laboratory work, information gathering and analysis are the most time-consuming and mission-critical activities in pharmaceutical R&D. Scientists need to have fast and easy access to the latest findings on drug development in order to survive in an increasingly competitive field. However, these findings exist in many formats and are distributed across many departments, both internally and externally. As a result, the research and analysis of such information has always been a long and painstaking process and traditional CM processes are often hindered by the complex sensitivities that are intrinsic in the Pharmaceutical world.


Out of the ashes of the “Internet revolution” a new breed of CM system evolved - a model that effectively resolved the restrictions faced by the more traditional models by incorporating extremely intelligent, pliable search and retrieval tools. Now addressing the scientific nature of the language and the complexity of the associated requests, this new generation of CM system truly leverages the link between efficiency, productivity and revenue, effectively driving down the time to market at increasingly efficient rates.

Ultimately, providers of next generation CM tools have identified and addressed the four key areas that were hindering traditional search and retrieval systems being used within the Pharmaceutical industry - accuracy, security, scalability and the ability to search and retrieve relevant documents across a multitude of languages. Ovum defines next-generation search as, “the technologies and products that are bringing new levels of intelligence, order and personalisation to the search process.” By implementing next-generation search CM tools are tackling these four key areas and taking control of the vast amounts of information that the networked world generates.

Accuracy
Most knowledge workers want to be able to search the way they speak but too often end up with either unfocused queries that return thousands of hits, or queries that are too narrow and overlook the important results. Building on an already complex process, next generation CM tools have evolved to enable natural language querying, freeing up users to search the way they think in return for a very specific results list with the most accurate documents at the top. It does this through a combination of concept searching and pattern searching which results in fast, accurate and most importantly, extremely relevant results.

People naturally think in terms of concepts, not keywords, and their searches are often exploratory in nature. They don’t want to have to take the time to figure out what the right keywords are, but rather quickly enter a concept that translates the request into a complete search for all relevant and related concepts. For example, by using concepts, a user from the United Kingdom searching a newspaper database for the “rising toll of petrol” will find all relevant articles on increasing gasoline prices, even though the documents never use the words “rising”, “toll” or “petrol.”

Combined with pattern searching to identify misspelled words, this approach has been applied to the Pharmaceutical industry and concepts for a whole new language - the complex language of the pharmaceutical world - have been created. By incorporating semantic networks to automatically augment the query through pharmaceutical specific concepts and patterns, any terms and associated drug names that may have slipped the mind of the researcher, or that may have been spelt incorrectly, will still be included in the returned results. Furthermore, a number of next-generation CM providers offer “plug-ins” enabling R&D teams to further drill down the search criteria of a specialised field or to incorporate unique department-specific vocabulary into the system. An example could be for a team developing research on a particular skin complaint to “plug-in” concepts that are exclusive to dermatological agents.

Without pharmaceutical semantic networks and associated “plug-ins”, the person searching for the information determines the quality of the hit list. For instance, it is rare that everyone in a group of researchers would include all of the drug names associated with anti-psychotic drugs when conducting a search on this subject. With the extensive list of associated drugs available the right semantic network would include them all in the results regardless of whether they were included within the search criteria or were spelt incorrectly.

IDC research indicates, “Timely access to critical information separates the winners from the losers in today’s information economy.” Without this level of accuracy and therefore timely access to data, many real