| |August 20188he pharmaceuti-cal industry in its current avatar is in a very interest-ing position today. While tremendous progress has been made in ad-dressing patient needs for several deadly and dreaded diseases, as in any industry, there are a myriad of questions still requiring answers. For the purposes of the topic here, we will limit ourselves to product development within the proverbial four walls of a typical organization within the pharmaceutical indus-try rather than the entire value chain of healthcare.Some of the pressures faced by the industry today, both from with-in and the outside include, but are not limited to, the following: Internal - productivity, speed, costs, technical know-how and un-derstanding needed to solve rele-vant scientific questions External - regulatory, business macro environmentIT, while not a panacea for all ills, can and does play a signifi-cant role in moving the prover-bial needle forward, in what is predominantly an innovation- driven industry.The following sections high-light the opportunities for tech-nology in addressing some of the-what, the-how and the- why limiting the context to prod-uct development within the pharmaceutical industry span-ning drug discovery, clinical and manufacturing domains.Discovery and pre-clinical space ­The body of scientific knowledge when it comes to our understand-ing of human biology, grows pret-ty much on a daily basis. There-fore, it becomes crucial, even business-critical, to be able to de-termine what problem areas are mature enough for solving in order to address unmet patient needs. This leads into the solution space for tools that can help hone in on problems of scientific interest and potential impact. Then comes the question of what relevant deci-sion-enabling experiments need to be performed, what type of drug molecules need to be synthesized and tested etc. Again, this is an area ripe with potential opportunities in the modeling and simulation space, with the potential to test multiple hypotheses in parallel as well as benefits such as speed and cost avoidance. For instance, sys-tems biology, computer aided drug design, computational chemistry, synthetic route design, omics etc. are all loaded with opportunities for the open source software devel-opment world, cloud computing, sharing and collaboration across borders;all with tremendous poten-tial to address challenges within this stage of product development.Many of these technology solu-tions exist today. The next level of maturity in this will come with making these usable in integrated fashion, potentially opening up research opportunities and speedy decision-making in ways that may not be easily apparent today.Suffice to say that it is quite ex-citing to think that the day is not TPHARMACEUTICAL TECHNOLOGY - AN IT ENABLER'S PERSPECTIVEBy Srivatsan Krishnan, Group Director, COO, Biocon Bristol-Myers Squibb R&D CenterSrivatsan Krishnan works for Biocon Bristol-Myers Squibb R&D Center as Head of R&D Operations and IT. His expertise revolves around Client relationship management, Vendor management, Alliance management, Project/Program Management (PMP), and Business Capability Management. expert opinion
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