About
Mission & History

Mission & History

The Pistoia Alliance was first conceived by informatics experts at AstraZeneca, GSK, Novartis, and Pfizer who were together attending a meeting in Pistoia, Italy. During the meeting and ensuing conversations, Pistoia’s founders realized that their organizations were all individually tackling the same precompetitive problems—issues around aggregating, accessing, and sharing data that are essential to innovation, but provide little competitive advantage. They realized that working together to solve these common problems would free their organizations to innovate by enabling them to cut costs and repurpose precious resources to projects with more strategic, competitive impact.

The Pistoia Alliance was established as a members’ organization in 2009. Today, it includes over 45 member organizations encompassing life science companies, academic groups, informatics vendors, and publishers. Together, Pistoia Alliance members aim to lower barriers to innovation by improving the interoperability of R&D business processes through precompetitive collaboration. The organization focuses on bringing stakeholders to the table to define common, conceptual steps of the life science R&D workflow.

As such, it serves to:

  • Assemble and aggregate common use cases
  • Facilitate conversation, collaboration, and innovation
  • Incubate and deliver concepts and pilot projects that support precompetitive collaboration
  • Develop and iterate business models for information-based services that reflect the changing life science marketplace and the pressures for innovation

While initially founded to explore the feasibility of certain technical standards to streamline specific workflows in biology and chemistry, the Pistoia Alliance is more than a standards group. A large amount of Pistoia’s work is about influencing the constituents and identifying the common barriers to innovation so that the stakeholders can work together to overcome them. We also maintain close ties to  groups such as IMI, W3C HCLS, NIH, BioIT Alliance, and PRISM/PRIME to help organizations implement the best technologies and processes to streamline individual workflows and support innovation.

We believe a solid working relationship among all stakeholders will evolve a global, collaborative information ecosystem that can resolve emerging challenges in the precompetitive domains of life science R&D.

About Pistoia (Italy)

Our namesake is a city in Tuscany. Never been? Here are some facts about Pistoia:

  • Pistoia became a Roman colony in the 6th century. The walls around the city centre date from the 14th century.
  • Pistoia has built trains for over a century and was recently selected to produce the V300 Zefiro, a new high-speed train for Italian rail.
  • A ritual duel between lance-armed horsemen and a bear called the Giostra dell'Orso ("Joust of the Bear") was first recorded in 1300 and has been a yearly, modern event in Pistoia since 1947.
  • Singing the blues may not seem an Italian pastime, but Pistoia hosts a Blues Festival every July that has featured such artists as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lou Reed, Pat Metheny, and Peaches (!!)
  • Does the Pistoia Alliance choose places to meet based on their restaurant quality? You be the judge!