As the market for new drugs evolves, the methodologies for moving them into the market is changing and becoming more complex, thus relying more and more on efficient communication and collaboration strategies between the various parties involved. With the dawning of personalized medicine and the passing era of blockbuster molecules, pharmaceutical companies are slowly shifting from an industry of products to one of information.

Pipelines are shrinking, the attrition rate for molecules in development is high, and drug markets in major therapeutic areas are being commoditized. Pharmaceutical companies are being forced to develop more truly innovative compounds, faster and at a lower cost if they want to survive. The issue being, how to get sufficient amounts of compounds to ensure at least one will make it to the market. It may seem contradictory, but a key obsession of the pharmaceutical industry is to then be able to identify as quickly as possible those candidates that are likely to fail, due to toxicity issues as an example, and drop them from their portfolio in order to free up and redirect precious resources to the winning horse.

To do this, pharmaceutical companies need to apply creativity to their research processes in order to build a large funnel of potential pharmaceutical projects. They are also driven to search externally, both in smaller companies as well as academia, for new drug candidates to in-license and continue development. Data from this research is often disparate in locations around the globe. Collaboration is essential in such research, as it is being done with multiple partners through an often iterative, continuous and long lasting process within the context of translational medicine for instance or outsourced to global organizations, which adds to the complexity of efficiently managing the generated data and effectively managing these candidates through the pipeline.

Within the context of product lifecycle management, multiple teams from departments that not only are different in functionality but also may be new to the project need to engage and collaborate to develop new formulation, new medical devices, new indications, etc. in order to extend the life of the drug’s patent and prevent the erosion of sales due to generics. Most pharmaceutical organizations today have seen the benefits of their initial collaboration efforts for improving data collection from clinical trials through electronic data capture, or from the way teams contribute to and assemble new drug submissions. However, efficient collaboration in many other aspects in this industry has yet to become second nature.

For these reasons, common collaborations are needed. The conference will show solutions from Big Pharma and small & medium sized biotech companies, how they work in and how the develop through collaboration their business models.