R&D
Empowerment through IT
Patti Gaves, senior director of product strategy for the Oracle Health
Sciences Global Business Unit, explains to Pete Chan how the company
has aligned its applications and infrastructure software with pharma’s evolving
challenges, with the aim of helping companies drive innovation, improve R&D
effi ciency and facilitate regulatory compliance
PATTI GAVES
Q. What is the Oracle Health Sciences Q. How are today’s pharmaceutical giants
Global Business Unit (GBU)? breaking through or working around
bureaucratic constraints to retain their
Oracle’s Health Sciences GBU is really like a
innovative spark?
company within a company, focusing
exclusively on applying IT to address the
Many believe that the “mega-merger” business
scientific and business challenges facing today’s
strategy that led to the formation of today’s
life sciences organisations. Oracle has launched
pharmaceutical giants – huge organisations
similar business unit structures to support
focusing on many different therapeutic areas –
other industry sectors, such as insurance,
has made these companies too large and
financial services and communications.
bureaucratic to retain their ability to innovate.
The Health Sciences GBU brings together
We’ve seen companies becoming victims of
teams within Oracle that formerly may have
their own success, whereby there is no agility,
been separated geographically or by function
no ability to make a decision and no single line
– neatly uniting dedicated professionals that
of accountability as there is in a business unit.
span multiple functions, including development,
As a result, many companies have begun to
sales, consulting, strategy, communications and
focus on redefining their core activities and
marketing – all with a focus on the health
even core therapeutic areas. One prominent
sciences industry.
new research model is seeing some
companies returning to their scientific roots,
Q. Why did Oracle decide to launch an
looking for inspiration in relationships with
organisation focused specifically on the life
biotechs, research centres and academia.
sciences industry?
Others are replicating “biotech-like”
environments within big pharma structures.
Still others are extending their long-term
Oracle has a long history in the industry –
strategic relationships with CROs.
with all 20 of the top 20 pharma companies
running Oracle. We support the entire
pharmaceutical life cycle from discovery and
Q. How can Oracle support these
development to manufacturing and marketing evolving approaches?
via our continually expanding and evolving
product set. Three factors – speed, agility and security –
We launched the business unit to help our are essential to sustaining large pharma
clients more effectively respond to continued innovation, and Oracle solutions support all
challenges in clinical trials, as well as the three. As organisations increasingly rely on
increasing linkages across life sciences, outside partners, they need to share large
diagnostics and healthcare. Through this new quantities of information – often disparate
organisational structure we look to advance data – and intelligence more quickly, effectively
the ability of organisations to discover, develop and securely than ever before. Large pharma
and successfully market innovative products companies’ research partners must be able to
and services to prevent and cure disease, access and transfer information at a moment’s
enhance quality of life and meet shareholder notice across organisations. Equally important
and stakeholder expectations. is agility; being able to adapt or abandon
Today, we are the only company that offers research or trials based on up-to-the moment
a unified data model that gathers and information.
synchronises real-time information across our Starting in the discovery cycle, Oracle’s data
clients’ organisations, including multiple platform for life sciences facilitates access to
research programmes, regulatory groups, distributed data, integration of a variety of data
manufacturing facilities and sales and marketing types, management of vast quantities of data
teams. This approach helps to optimise and secure collaboration across organisations.
discovery and accelerate the introduction of Additionally, our clinical data management
safe and effective products. systems, including Oracle Clinical and web-
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