Drug discovery in the new normal: Managing risk, Collaborating more.

Looking back over my experiences in the life sciences industry, I can identify a number of truisms about the industry that underline the importance of the Platinum Informatics product suite. Here I select two in particular:

1. The pharmaceutical industry is cautious and risk averse.
   
   And of course it is and should be. Consider the scale of the bets it is required to make in bringing a new medicine into the market. The scale and costs of pivotal Phase III studies are huge and continue to expand.
   

It is imperative for the sector to manage as far as possible those risks over which it can exert a measure of control and mitigation. Key to this is the ability to observe, record, recall and learn from what has gone before. This is particularly crucial in the most experimental of the pharmaceutical value chain, drug discovery and lead generation as companies look to lay the soundest of foundations for their drug R&D investments.

2. Success in drug discovery is not achievable as a single agent!
   
   This is the era of collaboration. 

The industry’s players cast their nets far and wide in search of the next big thing in pharmaceuticals. They rely on external sciences and services to enable their research activities: proteomics, metabolomics and the other ‘omics are harnessed to maximise the value to be gleaned from their investments and advances in genomics. Effective and efficient communications with scientific collaborators, partners and contractors is essential.

The attributes of Platinum’s Desimal suite are designed to deliver the clarity, transparency, reproducibility and crucially the ability to share the data, actions taken and of results obtained through the key attributes of dataManager and labTracker. While pipeLine offers additional value by enabling complex analytics across global operations.

Ken Fyvie

Non-Executive Director

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