New Projects for Pistoia
By Richard Holland
April 28, 2015 | Contributed Report | ZURICH--Early arrivals at the Pistoia Alliance Annual European Conference, held this year on April 14th at the offices of Hewlett Packard in Zurich, Switzerland, were able to enjoy the local festival of Sächsilüüte whereby a snowman (the Böögg, literally translated as the bogeyman) is packed with fireworks and placed atop a lit bonfire. The less time it takes for its head to explode, the better the summer will be.
Although not usually so spectacularly explosive, the life sciences industry is certainly feeling the heat at present as technology develops rapidly and commercial pressures increase. The goal is to avoid a similar fate to that of the unfortunate Böögg.
The 76 delegates from a range of organisations connected to the life sciences sector started their day with a panel discussion led by Jo Pisani of PwC on the topic of “Big Innovation”. Three speakers presented their innovation experiences from areas not usually associated with pharma R&D, describing examples of success that might inspire or be replicated by those present.
Stuart Robertson of Exostar discussed the adoption of a common secure identity management by the teams behind the development of the Boeing 787 aircraft. The aerospace and defence industry’s drive towards commercial innovation as well as the continuing need to comply with regulation leads to a complex web of partners all needing to work together, with Boeing alone having 26,500 supplier and partner contracts around the world. The establishment of an Aerospace & Defence Community Hub, with identity management at its core, has enabled them all to collaborate securely on over 1,000 IT applications. It does not require a large leap of imagination to suggest that members of the life sciences community might consider adopting a similar approach with their own network of research partners.
Ruud Schoemaker of Friesl and Campina demonstrated the benefits of improving internal R&D data sharing and visualisation within a food and nutrition company, explaining how their ONE programme turned an 80%/20% invisible/visible pile of unstructured data into an 80%/20% shared/secret mix, giving internal scientists access to four times as much information almost overnight by doing no more than properly annotating and cataloguing what was already available. Bayer Crop Science’s Jakob de Vlieg gave the final presentation of the panel, showing how collaboration across multiple parts of the company produced a new higher-yielding canola strain with significantly improved resistance to pod shattering.
Jo Pisani’s closing comments referred to the increasing need to obtain and work with real-world evidence. No longer is it possible to rely on internal R&D data alone to produce the kind of results the pharma industry needs. Companies must look to the outside to collaborate pre-competitively with partners and competitors, and to make optimal use of the data that is already being gathered by the end-users of their products. By studying clinical outcomes more closely, a greater understanding may be had of the performance of the drugs developed and the nature of the treatment pathway that may inform the development of future innovations.
Following the panel discussion, Adriano Henney of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute and Joe Donahue of BioReference Laboratories both spoke on the topic of “Big Ideas”. The huge potential of Adriano’s work on in-silico clinical trials, Avicenna, was self-evidential with the ultimate goal of minimising if not removing altogether the need for human testing. The initial roadmap development is nearing completion and the Avicenna project is now seeking to establish a consortium to start developing the technology and standards required to make the concepts a reality. Joe Donahue, meanwhile, proved Jo Pisani’s earlier point by demonstrating the depth and breadth of treatment data which his diagnostic lab is able to gather from patients and clinicians. BioReference Laboratories is now offering potential collaborators access to some of the genetic data from this real-world evidence by securely declaring its availability via the first beacon (public data endpoint) to be developed by a commercial organisation for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health’s Beacon project.
A common theme throughout the conference was the importance of collaboration in supporting innovation. The Pistoia Alliance has run a number of collaborative projects over the years and was able to show the audience that these have delivered real benefit to the life sciences R&D industry. Alongside updates on current projects, such as the Controlled Substance Compliance Service Expert Community (CSCS), and the Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules (HELM), winner of the Bio-IT World Best Practice Award in 2014, the audience heard three use-cases from organisations that have deployed Pistoia Alliance outputs to good effect. Daniel Baeschlin of Novartis presented their adoption of a CSCS solution, Stefan Klostermann of Roche discussed their use of HELM to develop a useful new antibody editor tool (itself now available freely under the same terms as HELM itself), and Misha Kapushesky discussed how he had used the concepts of an earlier project called Sequence Services to develop his company, GeneStack, into the success that it is today.
John Wise set out the Alliance’s plans for the next set of projects. Ontologies Mapping will bring together diverse ontologies and work with them as one, and the Chemical Safety Library aims to make better use of accident and incident reports from chemistry labs to decrease the reoccurrence of similar events. Ontologies Mapping is already a funded, active project with a delivery deadline of December 2015, while the Chemical Safety Library is still in the fundraising stages. Interested parties were encouraged to join the project teams or make funding commitments by leaving comments or making pledges via the Pistoia Alliance’s innovation portfolio website: http://ip3.pistoiaalliance.org/
Invited speakers from other alliances and industry groups including the Open PHACTS Foundation, the Allotrope Foundation, and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, as well as the Innovative Medicines Initiative, gave updates on the current activity and goals of their own organisations. A new Map of Alliances project was formally announced as a tool to gather, share and visualise data about these and other alliances so that a complete picture can be formed of the alliance and consortium landscape. The Pistoia Alliance is gathering submissions and suggestions for this project via a dedicated page on its innovation portfolio website: https://main.qmarkets.org/live/pistoia/node/1420
While the day’s agenda had been tightly packed, giving all present plenty to think about, thankfully nobody met the same fate as the Böögg and all left with their heads intact if not stuffed full with new ideas to try out upon their return.
Richard Holland is the Executive Director of Operations for the Pistoia Alliance.