IT and Pharmaceutical Data: Finding Needles in Haystacks - ' The Challenge of Grid '

The Challenge of Grid Computing

Your look toward grid computing is intriguing. Down the road, how does Bristol-Myers Squibb hope to tackle this?

We have partnered with a firm called Platform Computing, and we are using their software and then customizing some of our own scientific algorithms internally to run on their software. So this is not something we're doing solely on our own.

There also are a number of different firms—some large like IBM, some that are small venture capital funded firms—that we are talking with about how we can make use of some of this kind of technology. But so far we're dealing with one particular vendor, and we're customizing a lot of our own analysis algorithms to take advantage of the technology.

One other term that's tossed about freely these days is the real-time enterprise. How does that impact Bristol-Myers Squibb?

Well, I guess we don't talk about it very much, but we do sort of assume we live it. In different parts of our business, there are different time scales. For instance, on the one hand, drug development is a very lengthy process. Historically, it's taken on the order of 12 years from the time that a drug is a concept in someone's mind's eye in a laboratory to the point where that drug is actually available to patients. We are decreasing those time lines significantly, but within that there's a lot of almost real-time work that has to go on in terms of the way we manage the trials that we do, in terms of the way that we manage our chemical processes.

If you talk about what are the critical success factors for companies within the pharma industry, I think that there are really two. One is innovation, and the other is process excellence, and process excellence is embedded with dimensions of speed, quality, time, and so forth.

It's been made very clear by the marketplace and by regulatory agencies worldwide that developing the fifth, tenth, or twentieth look-alike compound to something that is already on the market is not going to be the wave of the future, that they would be something that people are not going to be willing to pay for, governments are not going to be willing to pay for, HMOs are not going to be willing to reimburse for drugs unless they are truly novel and address an unmet medical need.

So one of the major challenges that every pharmaceutical company has is the challenge of innovation, and that comes back to excellence in research and development.

The second challenge, as I said, is the process excellence challenge, because people have to be fast, they've got to be nimble, and we have to be able to do more and more of this kind of work at lower and lower unit cost. In many ways what is happening in the pharma industry right now with some of the consolidations is that people are looking for critical mass. People are looking at the number of critical trials that have to be done.

The amount of work that's got to go on in drug discovery in order to support this kind of innovation can only be done with larger numbers of people, with larger facilities, with larger budgets. So the challenge is going to be how do we, as an industry, lower the unit costs while still supporting the kind of innovation that we need in order to bring novel new drugs to market?