I’m thrilled that Collaborative Drug Discovery has chosen to renew its annual membership with us. Of course, I’d like to hear more about why CDD ultimately decided to renew given the reservations expressed in this blog entry about Pistoia being “more of the same” (Hint: Barry, this is your cue to tell us more in a comment below!).
Let me say up front that we firmly believe as Barry does: That it’s through the ability to share key information services and facilitate effective collaboration that we ALL will increase our chances of successfully innovating. That’s what is going to bring success to our industry and to the future lives of patients everywhere.
Reading Barry’s honest post made me reflect on the reasons the Pistoia Alliance was formed, but in the context of the pace of change we’ve seen since we met in that restaurant in 2007. Pistoia’s founders knew that to do something different, we had to bring a broad cross section of the industry together—including life science companies; vendors in informatics, content, and services; and academics. We couldn’t just target one of these groups and expect anything to change. That’s because, perhaps more than any other industry, we are all in this together, with “this” being a constantly evolving ecosystem. Just look at all the mergers and takeovers and exciting new companies that have emerged in 2011 alone—and how the players shift between constituencies, working today for a vendor, tomorrow for a pharma, the next day for a start-up. None of us can go it alone. Our success or failure depends on how we blend the different skills we have—and that means collaborating.
It’s easy to talk about what’s wrong with drug discovery (I also recommend In the Pipeline’s summary and of course, we’ve talked about it). What’s harder is fixing it. The innovation we all want has to happen in the face of many other challenges. But it’s not going to happen if we continue to do things behind our own firewalls following the same, familiar business models.
We’re having some success at changing the model. The sequence services project has already fostered some unexpected collaborations, and we look forward to seeing more of that in the phase 2 pilots. But the change we seek won’t happen in one go. And it won’t happen if our members don’t think outside their comfort zones about how to make innovative collaboration work.
CDD has laid down a gauntlet. How are you going to respond?
Given our aligned interests in advancing the state of the art of drug discovery spanning the pre-competitive and competitive space, we have decided to renew our membership with Pistoia Alliance. At CDD (www.collaborativedrug.com), we are thinking long-term, and feel it is important to be part of the dialog. Given our focus, we would like to see the Pistoia Alliance work with us and others on molecular registration and SAR database standards, since they represent composition of matter and utility patent data at the heart of drug discovery. We realize these are harder problems, but they are the important ones. The ultimate goal is to blur the pre-competitive and competitive space while seamlessly protecting IP with technological advances in collaborative capabilities that map to natural workflows. This would make the distinction irrelevant…and both “spaces” more cost effective.
So I wanted to get back to Nick’s post from September 1st and his question “so why did you decide to renew?”
I was initially the one pushing Barry to consider to not renewing our membership. For the fee you can buy a lot of lunch-time pizza (morale) for your team, prospects, or customers. And then I was wondering: What do we get out of this membership, did we get anything last year? Did they get anything from us? Did any of us learn anything? So I rolled my eyes and said “I feel this is “same old, same old” why invest time and resources here? This is not the place to find true innovators!”
I thought that Pistoia was mostly about the same paradigms that were created 5 -10 years ago and trying to apply those to issues the industry faces today. Our interest (CDD’s) is different: Trying to understand how the (drug discovery) world will function 5-10 years from now and to address tomorrow’s structures today by driving innovation in technology. Why would we even want to swim with all those big fish in this Pistoia pond?
Both Barry and Sean though saw this quite differently. They saw that Pistoia could be the beachhead for fundamental change in our industry to push a more collaborative model with more collaborative technologies that support where the industry is moving. Their argument was that there is a growing understanding in the industry that the “old ways” don’t work anymore. People
are now seriously looking at new models for innovation, data and IP capture and sharing via new paradigms. Barry and Sean also had met with some very innovative and gutsy people from that space who were willing to stick their neck out. So maybe we will be able to see inspirational and successful case studies, where bold people try new ideas and “gutsy” projects help making collaboration much less scary and more mainstream.
One suggestion I do have for Pistoia though. Pistoia should invite more diversity; I think they need to make it easier for the “small guys” at young innovative companies and industry expatriates now in the academic diaspora to join. The current membership pricing to me looks prohibitive for those which Pistoia needs most: The nimble, focused laboratories generating new data and IP who are dreaming about partnering with a big pharma to take their beginning of a drug candidate to market or at least into the clinic. We at CDD are just “lucky” that we are economically successful and profitable enough to afford membership. But for many of our customers, the Pistoia Alliance would be a luxury that they cannot afford. We do have firsthand knowledge about their budgets, price points and pains since they do use CDD as “their workhorse” (as one called it) and we do have insight into their workflows and business structures. So I end with one suggestion – perhaps review your fee structure and make it real easy for small innovative groups (FTEs < 20) to join in the dialog?
Cheers! – Sylvia