Reducing costs is not the only reason for outsourcing. Restoring innovation and increasing productivity should be equally valid drivers, argues Richard Boehner, of Symyx
With a faltering economy, increased competition generated by generic drugs, the skyrocketing expense of marketing blockbusters, and unsustainable r&d expenditures, pharmaceutical companies are looking for ways to reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of their drug discovery and development operations. As a result, they are accelerating the pace and extent to which they are outsourcing their r&d operations. However, many companies are focusing primarily, or even exclusively, on the cost savings component of outsourcing. As appealing as it may be, this strategy is not sustainable and overlooks other important criteria in restoring drug pipelines.
It is not that lowering r&d costs is not important (especially in today's economic climate), but history has shown that the benefit of outsourcing simply to lower cost is transitory. To be sustainable over the long term, r&d outsourcing in pharma has to increase productivity as well as reduce costs.
One way for pharmaceutical companies to adopt an outsourcing strategy focused on increasing productivity is to partner with a contract research organisation (CRO) that utilises microscale parallel experimentation and advanced informatics technology.
An alternative to offshoring tedious tasks to unskilled labourers abroad, microscale parallel experimentation speeds fundamental preclinical drug discovery research by automating lab tasks such as sample preparation, processing and analysis. Outsourcing that utilises automated experimentation shortens the path to more viable drug candidates by exploring multiple scenarios, running hundreds or even thousands of experiments in parallel, all while examining economies of scale on a per experiment basis.
Automated experimentation can accelerate a wide range of common workflow tasks including solubility profiling, polymorph and salt selection, liquid formulations, forced degradation, excipient compatibility, and process optimisation. Compared with a scientist who can run about 500 experiments per year, parallel experimentation can run up to 25,000. It can reduce the cost per experiment by up to 90% and achieve up to a 90% decrease in the amount of expensive, early-development material needed . This improvement, while eliminating costly, labour-intensive work, not only dramatically increases productivity but also enables companies to demonstrate increased ROI.
informatics management
As evidenced by the current state of the economy, it is almost certain that scientists will be required to do more with less and in a shorter time. In an age when we are seeing more and more compounds getting all the way to phase 3 trials before failing, the importance of eliminating unpromising compounds as early as possible has never been so important. Failing compounds early can save companies millions of dollars in time and resources.
Employing advanced informatics to design, execute and analyse experiments helps in predicting outcomes earlier and in giving directional analysis to speed up drug discovery. It is important for pharma companies to partner with a CRO that utilises advanced informatics solutions, such as electronic lab notebooks, data acquisition and decision-support software, and scientific databases. Such digital solutions are easier to work with and they shorten the time required for visualisation and analysis of large sets of data from weeks to days. These advantages provide the ultimate flexibility for researchers and scientists in shifting resources away from compounds more likely to fail and on to those more promising.
winning strategy
Consolidation in the industry threatens to eliminate the competitiveness that has fuelled blockbuster innovation. However, under the right strategy and done for the right reasons, outsourcing offers pharma the opportunity to reinvent the r&d process, making it a more productive environment. Outsourcing with a CRO that accelerates research and utilises advanced informatics will help companies generate more viable compounds and shorten the path to a more promising pipeline.