Thursday, August 01, 2002

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EyeForPharma Study demonstrates crucial role IT will play in enhancing Pharma R&D

"The analysis, conducted earlier this year, shows that pharma companies with optimally implemented informatics solutions could save as much as $264 million in R&D costs, and as much as one year in development time for each new ethical drug. According to analysts, R&D informatics promises to generate the greatest portion of the potential savings - up to $149 million of the $264 million - by integrating data and information across disciplines, pharmaceutical departments, processes and drugs."

redux [10.17.01]
CIO Magazine Drug Companies On Speed

""We're an information-based industry, but we've been a bit behind in the extent to which we've been using computer-based tools," Dinerstein says. "They've had better computer models for oil drilling than we've had for drug discovery."

While executives in this closely guarded industry won't say how much they're investing in research and development informatics, they are definitely hopping on board. Merck & Co. in Whitehouse Station, N.J., recently paid $620 million to acquire Rosetta Inpharmatics, a genomics and technology company based in Kirkland, Wash. And New York City-based Pfizer says it recently spent more than $100 million to create an "integrated system of high-speed discovery technologies." Pradip Banderjee, a senior partner with Accenture Consulting, conservatively estimates that drugmakers as a whole spend more than $4 billion a year on that kind of technology, not including the cost of hardware."

redux [08.19.01]
EyeForPharma Gartner predicts Pharma's IT spending on the rise

"In a recent forecast analysis, Gartner predicts U.S. pharmaceutical companies' IT spending will increase at a CAGR (calculated annual growth rate) of 12.8 percent - from $3 billion in 2000 to more than $5.5 billion by 2005. The group forecasts spending on software and external services will outpace spending for hardware, network equipment and internal services."

redux [05.26.00]
Drug Discovery Online Where Next for Genomics?

"Leaders in the genomics field, as in any other industry, will be companies that offer a value-added service. Large pharmaceutical companies agree on what that service should be: integration of all the genomics information available. With more information readily accessible, companies can easily decide on whether to continue investigating potential targets.

So the future of genomics companies may rest in their IT and software capabilities, a view held by Celera Genomics, a newcomer to genomics. "We are entering an era of 'cyberpharmaceutical' drug development," says Samual Broder, executive VP and chief medical officer. "Pharmaceutical corporations will use genomic databases, and other relational databases involving gene expression, proteomics etc. as the foundation of their drug discovery pipelines. One of the immediate goals... is to produce appropriate databases and software to link biologic and genomic information.""

redux [11.29.01]
The Scientist A Flood in Genomics
[requires 'free' registration]

"Glenn Giovanetti at Ernst & Young Life Sciences Industry Services, comments "You could really compare [today's situation] to a large degree with the first biotech boom in the late eighties and early nineties where the thought was, 'Hey, this is going to lead to better drugs faster,' and clearly that hasn't been the case." Having the genome in hand has brought about more drug targets, but, explains Ma, "People are getting more concerned that novel targets are going to have a higher rate of failures because there is less information on them." And when working in 10-year drug-development cycles, failures are costly.

Ma points to a trend of growth in clinical informatics that would effectively garner more information from expensive clinical trials instead of simply treating them as regulatory hurdles. "People are beginning to think through to how ... to take greater advantage of that information," he adds. But increasingly, the suppliers of genomic information have been looking to do the same thing.