Enabling drug development by efficient data management

By R Arun Kumar, Infosys

R Arun Kumar, Associate Vice President and Head of Global Life Sciences practice at Infosys, discusses the influence of data management systems on drug development.

How has the introduction of data management systems affected the drug development process in recent years?

R Arun Kumar. Data management has primarily improved information flow across the drug discovery and development processes and has provided managements with improved visibility into the status of a project, as well as enabled researchers with efficient decision-making. The drivers to manage research information from biology, chemistry and pre-clinical development are to ensure clear understanding of project development objectives, facilitate a project-team based approach towards drug discovery by providing access to annotated knowledge sources and to help in monitoring progress towards R&D milestones.

Facilitation of targeted analysis of data to improve understanding of the disease model and the interaction of candidate compounds is now possible. Data management thus enables taking a more holistic approach to decision-making in drug development, leading to better research outcomes, improved research productivity and reduced cost of innovation.

What challenges has the Infosys Scientific Innovation solution overcome and to what extent, if any, will it create additional challenges?

RAK. The Infosys Scientific Innovation solution addresses the basic problems of information disconnect and siloed approach towards discovery research. It provides for harmonisation of multiple research workflows; semantic interconnect and transformation across diverse knowledge sources; novel ways to identify, associate and search for scientific entities; and make available intuitive visualisation and analytics capabilities.

Infosys proposes to manage additional challenges of user adoption with a business value driven change management model, and also brings together best practices in usability engineering and user experience design. Infosys research ensures that scalability of semantic interconnect solutions will exceed most business requirements.

To what degree can the solution framework help predict scientific innovation?

RAK. Linking of academic research, public data libraries and pharmaceutical research to improve success in the drug discovery process is the key to improving the research productivity in drug discovery and development. Infosys solution reduces the burden of data dredging or finding a needle in a haystack situation. On the other hand, it anticipates stakeholder needs and makes information available in real time. It is this key objective which the solution framework addresses. In addition, the solution allows for and supports knowledge pooling, peer collaboration, and workflow harmonisation to reduce research redundancies.

Given the efficient semantic interconnect and networking capability, the solution framework can help in generation of new scientific possibilities. Research organisations can manage scientific information from ideating to developing a proof-of-concept, measure research performance at each step with the objective of addressing inefficiencies and leveraging relevant best practices.

How do you see IT and data management developing within the arena of drug development in future years?

RAK. There is an explosion of biological and chemical data along with manufacturing and clinical data. Effective cross-linking of these data volumes is necessary for generation of novel therapeutics. Existing data management systems link to specified databases and thereby are limited in their ability to cater to new drug discovery and development.

For the entire drug development process to be productive beyond present limits, technology supported data management need to be integral components of the drug development process. Scientific data management activities and responsibilities must be well defined and integrated with the pharma process definitions for a given drug development project. Achieving real-time communication, 24x7 information access, and virtualisation of operational tasks like data retrieval across databases will become the primary focus of the drug discovery industry in its endeavour to replenish the pipeline with new and innovative therapeutics.

Biography

R Arun Kumar is an Associate Vice-President, who heads the Global Life Sciences practice at Infosys and is responsible for the growth and expansion in the Life Sciences domain. Kumar has more than 16 years of professional experience in the areas of business-technology alignment, IT and BPO services, global sourcing, strategy & marketing, software product development, wireless and consumer goods. His career spans multiple continents and he has worked in leadership roles in established trans-nationals as well as in start-ups. Kumar lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached at R_ArunKumar@infosys.com.