In a cost driven environment companies have realised that working collaboratively is mutually beneficial. The Pistoia Alliance was established to streamline non-competitive elements of the pharmaceutical drug discovery workflow (chemistry, biological screening, integration, logistics) by the specification of common business terms & vocabularies, their relationships and use in process models.

To achieve this objective, Pistoia Alliance engages institutions invested in drug discovery and software implementers in a discussion about how to best support common needs. It does this by focusing the discussion on the definition of the conceptual interfaces between the components of the drug discovery workflow and the supporting software systems.

Pistoia Alliance provides a forum to capture and discuss emerging ideas, to evolve them into collaboratively managed projects, and to publish the resulting interface definitions.