How is the Pharma Industry expanding to better integrate data into their practices?

Recently, we sat down with Data Driven Drug Development Speakers Terry Tougas , Chair of the International Consortium on Innovation and Quality in Pharmaceutical Development/ IQ Consortium and Gordon Hanson, Chair of the Allotrope Foundation to discuss the current state of data integration into the Pharma industry. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing their answers.

This week's featured question is: Tell us what is going on in the pharmaceutical industry right now in data integration that fostered the creation of the IQ Consortium and the Allotrope Foundation?

Gordon: The Allotrope Foundation, as you are all aware and as we see in the media, the harmaceutical industry is really challenged with ways in which to improve its efficiencies. How can we deliver new medicines to patients as economically as possible? In part, that’s due to inefficiency within the industry and ways in which it can handle and manage its data. 

If you look at the analogy with day-to-day life, each of us has better access to data in our personal lives than we do within our own industry, within our own shop and data that we ourselves generate. And this leads to a tremendous inefficiency requiring tedious manual work and re-work of data and documents by highly technical staff, repeated experiments and just overall inefficiencies in how we put together data from disparate functions within our organizations. This is really one of the drivers – maybe the key driver – in the formation of the Allotrope Foundation. How can we make better use of data that we’ve generated and basically do our job much more efficiently than we are doing today?

Terry: I’ll start by saying a couple of words on the IQ side of this. IQ has perhaps a broader scope than just the data. We really were formed around the notion of looking at improvements to drug development in general. So, we span all of that. Obviously, in particular, the data issues are the ones that are very dear to us. In fact, as we’ll hear, it led to Allotrope. But, our real focus is that, in general, as an organization of companies, there are many things that we can address to improve topics and standards and best practices within what I would call the “pre-competitive space”. That’s really what we’re all about. I think that there is a general feeling that there’s a lot of benefit to all the stakeholders. The industry, obviously, but also regulators and ultimately the patients, as well, by getting together in these kinds of forums to discuss these kinds of scientific issues.

To view the rest of the podcast, download it here. 

 Gordon and Terry will both be speakers at this year's Data Driven Drug Development Event. To find out more, download the agenda. If you're interested in joining us January 28-29 in Philadelphia, as a reader of this blog, when you register to join us, mention code XP1715BLOG and save 15% off the standard rate.

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