Thoughts on Pharmaceutical Research Coordination

Futurologists continue to tell us (Naisbit 1982, Diebold 1984, Porter 1985, Skinner 1985, Toffler 1990) that we are entering an information age, in which intellectual property and the ability to translate it into flexible productive systems will be the principal competitive advantage available to corporations. Exploiting information systems for this purpose in the pharmaceutical industry is a daunting task, for these systems must cover the entire process from drug discovery, through clinical testing, to full scale production. These processes, for either chemically synthesized or genetically engineered drugs, produce process know how through a sequence of increasing batch scales (Pisano 1997). At all scales, the ability to gather and analyze research data, to develop these data into models, and to rapidly improve production yields through the effective capture and use of process information determines the ultimate profitability of a product.