Pharmaceutical Collaboration:
The pharmaceutical industry is in the midst of a revolution. The sheer volume and complexity of these leads is straining the ability of pharmaceutical companies to follow up. At the same time, reduced patent-exclusivity periods mean that pharmaceutical companies are under increased financial pressure to develop more drugs more quickly to maintain a competitive advantage.
To cope with these challenges, there needs to be pharmaceutical collaborate within the industry and deal with tremendous transformation. Pharmaceutical companies are merging to gain a breadth of expertise and are refining their focus to a few disease states. They're also increasingly outsourcing clinical trials and molecule synthesis to independent service providers to help follow up drug candidate leads. This trend toward outsourcing has created the need for ways to improve pharma collaboration with partners.
BroadVision technology can help pharmaceutical companies ensure effective Pharmaceutical Collaboration with partners. By streamlining pharmaceutical collaboration, the exchange of critical information about drugs, clinical trials and molecule synthesis processes with partners, BroadVision collaboration capabilities allow pharmaceutical companies to:
- Eliminate dead ends while at the same time safeguarding intellectual property
- Improve quality and reliability of research results by allowing pharmaceutical companies to monitor more closely how partners are performing their work
- Speed the new drug approval process-both within the United States and worldwide-by helping pharmaceutical companies to provide regulatory agencies with more complete information in a more timely fashion
Using these BroadVision capabilities, pharmaceutical companies can take advantage of the first-mover and first-to-critical-mass advantages necessary to thrive in today's competitive and fast-moving environment.
The $315 billion pharmaceuticals industry has grown almost 10 percent year-over-year for the past decade. Forecasts predict that growth is likely to continue at this rate for the foreseeable future. This growth has been fueled by an increase in both demand for and supply of new drug products.
Demand comes from aging populations in North America, Western Europe and Japan that wish to maintain their quality of life. The managed care organizations that treat these patients also realize that preventative pharmaceutical therapy is significantly less expensive than hospitalization or invasive surgery.
At the same time, new drug discovery methods are allowing pharmaceutical collaboration to meet this demand with an increasing supply of new products. The Human Genome Project has already identified disease targets for new therapies, including targets for breast cancer, colon cancer, Crohn's disease, Alzheimer's and others. To alleviate these diseases, new combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening (HTS) processes are allowing researchers to create drug candidate libraries with tens of thousands of molecules, then to identify a lead drug series in months instead of years. As a result, between 1995 and 2000 there was a 65 percent annual increase in the number of potential drugs available for future development (Source: Penn Industries).
With these new opportunities have come new challenges for Pharmaceutical Collaboration. As molecule synthesis has become more complex, creating new drugs has become more complicated. Ten years ago, the number of steps required to synthesize the average pharmaceutical product was 7; today it is 14. This complexity, combined with growth in the sheer numbers of leads, has strained the pharmaceutical industry's ability to follow up on potentially promising leads.
