Description
Biomedical research has become increasingly driven by creating and consuming tremendous volumes of complex data whether biological, genomic, proteomic, metabolomic or molecular in nature. At the same time the pharmaceutical industry is utilizing an extended network of partner organizations of various sorts (CRO ‘ s, not – for – profi t organizations, clinicians and academics) in order to discover and develop new drugs. Current areas of interest for delivering new technologies or molecules to the industry are Open Innovation, Collaborative Innovation and of course, Open Source. Due to the mounting costs, collaborative research and development is undoubtedly the future of biomedical research. There is currently little if any guidance for managing information and computational resources across collaborations of different types. This represents a large cost as experiments can be repeated inadvertently and the cost and time – savings that could result from precompetitive data sharing have generally been ignored. Improving drug discovery or development technology alone is not the solution and we need intelligent information systems and an understanding of how to use them effectively to create and manage knowledge across these collaborations.
This book thoroughly details a real set of problems from the human collaborative and data and informatics aspects and is therefore very relevant to the day – to – day activities of running a laboratory or a collaborative research and development project. The processes, approaches and recommendations provided in this book could be applied to help organizations immediately make critical decisions about managing drug discovery and development partnerships. The chapters provide case histories of biomedical collaborations while the technology specific chapters have effectively balanced technological depth and accessibility for the non – specialist reader. The structure of the book will follow a ” man – methods – machine ” format and the book is divided into four sections:
Part I. Getting People to Collaborate
Part II: Methods and Processes for Collaborations
Part III. Tools for Collaborations
Part IV. The Future of Collaborations
This book may offer the reader a ” getting started guide ” or instruction on ” how to collaborate ” for new laboratories, new companies, and new partnerships, as well as a user manual for how to troubleshoot existing collaborations. This book should therefore be of interest to most researchers involved in developing IT systems in the pharmaceutical industry. It should also be particularly pertinent to those leading and participating in collaborative IT consortia for Drug Discovery and Development which are, at the time of writing, increasing in both scope and number.
The book is possible as a result of the contributions of a wide array of authors from pharmaceutical companies, consulting companies, software companies, government institutes, nonprofi ts, and academia with chapters written by acknowledged pioneers in the fi eld. We have aimed for a complete volume that can be read by all interested in biomedical research and development and with each chapter edited to ensure consistency across the common theme of collaboration and with appropriate explanatory fi gures and key references. We are confi dent this book will become a valuable reference work for those interested in collaborative approaches to biomedical research. Certainly this volume represents a point in time for a fast – moving domain of innovation and effort. We hope to revisit this again in the coming years and report on the eventual successes, impacts and shifts in technology as well as cover areas not included in detail.