Latest Projects
Our projects transform R&D innovation through pre-competitive collaboration. We bring together the key constituents to identify the root causes that lead to R&D inefficiencies. We develop best practices and technology pilots to overcome common obstacles.
Project one: Natural Language Processing (NLP) Use Case Database Project
This collaborative project was launched to create a bottom-up qualitative Natural Language Processing (NLP) Use Case Database, to allow NLP practitioners in pharma companies to share successes and failures with their peers. Narrowing down successful use case scenarios will lead to less experimentation and higher success rates for new NLP initiatives.
Natural Language Processing offers great promise to improve efficiency and understanding of relationships and extract meaning from vast amounts of unstructured text. Pharma companies apply NLP methods in hopes of automation and insight generation. NLP experts have been investing significant resources in developing tools to address multiple business cases throughout the pharma industry in domains as varied as R&D, pharmacovigilance, and manufacturing, however, success seems very use case-specific.
Although Natural Language Processing algorithms have matured quite a bit during the past years, practical value for most NLP pilots tends to be poor, and very few NLP-driven projects are seen through to production. Exceptions are typically topics with good metadata quality, large training sets and willing business colleagues to verify results and a serendipitous combination of technical expertise and suitable use cases.
This type of knowledge is of value to share in a pre-competitive manner among Pistoia Alliance members. A simple database could contain characterization of use case, data characterization, pipelines & algorithms used, quality criteria, outcomes, and comments.
The team will deliver the following:
- A bottom-up qualitative NLP Success Failure Database with 50-100 Use cases
- Agreed annotations of NLP use case methods and success/failure criteria
- Collaborative insight into why NLP use cases may fail or succeed with an industry-wide view
Project Funders
Project two: IDMP Ontology Project
A well-defined ontology that bridges between regional and functional perspectives on common substance-related data objects and global and scientifically objective representations is required. The goal of our project is to build an IDMP Ontology that enables deep, semantic interoperability based on FAIR principles to enhance and augment the existing ISO IDMP standards.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) will be the first health agency to mandate compliance with ISO IDMP (Q1, 2023), with the FDA not far behind. Governance of essential IDMP standards and implementations is not assigned to a specific, overarching governing body. Diverging implementations of IDMP across geographical regions and jurisdictional domains are already causing inconsistencies in the interpretation across implementing organizations. Given that there is no semantic alignment between regulatory bodies, there exists a risk that regulatory compliance needs will lead to large integration and interoperability costs and that the benefits from IDMP in drug safety, innovation, and other areas will not be fully realized. Rather than concentrating on the discovery of new medicines, organizations will be struggling with data issues, e.g., the need to map product data across the organization, throughout the product lifecycle.
Due to our robust framework for pre-competitive collaboration. the Pistoia Alliance was selected to manage this initiative with the goal of creating a minimal viable product (MVP) ontology that demonstrates added value to the ISO IDMP standards for data usability across organizational boundaries and regulatory jurisdictions. We have pulled together a core team consisting of Pharmaceutical stakeholders, regulatory bodies, standards organizations, non-profit groups, and solutions providers for this project.
The key success factors for the project include:
- Phase 1 implementation of a quality MVP that can be used by pharmaceutical companies and others.
- Demonstration of the usability and added value of the ontology, which will be the foundation to obtain investment for the next phase of the project to build out the ontology more fully.
- Demonstration of governance capabilities.
- Open communication with all relevant stakeholders with results being shared openly.
Project three: Diversity & Inclusion in STEM Leadership Program
The goal of this program is to develop leadership and mentoring skills in diverse leaders at life science companies, enabling them to support, initiate, and/or lead diversity efforts at their respective companies.
While women make up 53% of the world’s STEM bachelor’s and master’s graduates, only 16% of management and 3% of CEOs are women. Data also suggests that women are more likely to leave the STEM career pipeline than men, widening the gap. In order for life science companies to build more inclusive cultures, it is important to understand the root causes that result in statistics like these and develop leaders that are committed to change from the top down.
This program will commence with a kick-off session followed by weekly training and monthly networking sessions.
The participants will be guided in the discussions by an accredited trainer and coach that will help them increase their leadership skills with the support of the group participants and better understand how to support D&I initiatives from their leadership role.
In the end, each leader will be equipped to support, diversity programs at their respective companies and will have a global community they can engage with for coaching, mentoring, or for further discussion.
The Pistoia Alliance with more than 200 member companies is perfectly positioned to run an industry-wide program. By deploying our framework for collaboration, we can effectively bring together diverse leaders from major players in the life sciences industry to provide training, networking, and sharing insightful knowledge that can result in bringing more diversity and inclusion on a global scale.
Learn more about our program stream for leaders of teams in life science who are interested in improving their leadership effectiveness in executive roles and augmenting their existing company programs to more effectively attract and retain talent.
