DATA MANAGEMENT: GLOBAL PHARMA SOLUTIONS
Informatics is just the tonic
Greg Blackman looks at some of the trends taking place in the pharmaceutical industry and how data management software is being used
The pharmaceutical industry has always been a competitive and fast-changing field. Drug discovery, which traditionally was based around small molecule chemistry (a classic drug like aspirin is composed of 21 atoms), now has to deal with the much larger proteins produced by biotechnology. Monoclonal antibodies, which fall under the classification of biologics, can be in the region of 20,000 atoms, three orders of magnitude larger. Laboratory practices are changing, with the move from paper to electronic records. There is an increase in laboratory automation, with robotic systems churning out terabytes of data. There’s also a cultural change, with more work outsourced, largely for economic reasons, rather than conducting everything in-house. All of the top pharma companies work
to some extent with electronic systems and all have evaluated, or are in the process of evaluating, how effectively these systems are deployed. Being able to share information within the company is one of the big benefits of recording data electronically and the systems should be integrated in such a way as to facilitate data sharing as much as possible. Trish Meek, director of product strategy for life sciences and informatics at Thermo Fisher Scientific, points out that it’s important to connect up the various electronic platforms. She comments: ‘If information is siloed in any one of these solutions, whether it is the ELN, LIMS, or an SDMS, then the greatest benefit of using electronic systems has not been realised.’ This also applies at
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a company level in that having silos of data at different sites is less effective than pooling that data and making it accessible throughout the enterprise. The drug discovery group of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has developed its Global Analytical Data Repository (GADR) using Waters’ NuGenesis Scientific Data Management System (SDMS), the main function of which is to store and retrieve all analytical data from the discovery sites worldwide and enable that data to be viewed throughout the company globally. ‘To have all the discovery data in a
single location is critical,’ states Gregory Murphy, director, global informatics business development at Waters. ‘Prior to this, analysts were e-mailing or faxing information backwards and forwards between different sites and it was very difficult to exchange information or ideas about different analyses. Now, anybody in the company has access to the analysis of a given compound, and all the research for the entire GSK discovery organisation is contained in a single repository.’ Murphy adds that one of the extra benefits was that, once scientists knew that their data would be accessible to everyone within the company, the quality of the data increased.
Biopharmaceuticals
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, traditional pharma is based around organic chemistry, which is a much older and more mature science than biology – there are naming conventions for compounds, companies have compound registries, etc. Biotech, on the other hand, is a less structured scientific discipline and operates via different processes and presents different challenges for an informatics platform. Dr Hans Peter Fischer, head of Phylosopher business unit at informatics solutions provider Genedata, likens comparing small organic molecules with large proteins such as monoclonal antibodies as ‘a bit like comparing a bicycle with a Boeing 747’ in terms of complexity and the number
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