What’s wrong with the Pistoia Alliance…and why we’re renewing our annual membership! (Part 2)

We ended Part 1 of this series predicting, “In the near future, effective collaborations will become the default mechanism for being competitive.”

With collaborative technologies where researchers can simultaneously evaluate private, collaborative and public data…the distinction between pre-competitive and competitive drug discovery becomes obsolete. By embracing collaborative technologies using standards for chemical data and biological data the distinction between what is pre-competitive and competitive becomes irrelevant…and both “spaces” become more cost effective. Publications and patents make knowledge available to all in text. Collaborative databases hold the promise to do the same with data – with the added benefit of being able to elegantly mine the accumulated treasures.

Areas like drug repositioning, neglected and commercial drug discovery all benefit by embracing standards. Collaborative platforms provide standard environments that compensate for differences between industry, academia, government, and foundations. Capabilities exist for temporal, spatial, and contextual partitioning of sensitive drug discovery data securely in the cloud. The key prerequisites are now in place to support the workflows of agile startups, precompetitive consortiums, and competitive collaborations across the ecosystem. The foundation is now in place to remove tremendous amounts of waste and redundancy from our drug discovery industry. Embracing truly collaborative approaches leverages others’ strengths and benefits all through the well established economic efficiencies of integrated specialization.

As an early adopter securely hosting drug discovery data in the cloud (for over 7 years), we were delighted to see the Pistoia Alliance rhetoric supporting exactly what collaborative technologies can now in practice enable in their recent Drug Discovery World article (Industry Challenges and Opportunities):

“What are the reasons why legal will not let R&D information be stored in the cloud – and can those reasons be addressed? Pharma in general and pharma R&D in particular is a high-risk business in dire need of innovation; critical service functions, eg IT, legal, procurement and QA should partner with R&D to understand this need and cut through red tape to create a true innovation culture.”

We look forward to working with the Pistoia Alliance to bridge the gap between the ideal situation and the real situation for all researchers in the future.

This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!

CDD Vault: Drug Discovery Informatics your whole project team will embrace!