Knowledge management: a multifaceted remedy

By using knowledge management at the beginning of the drug development process, AstraZeneca reduces the number of molecules to explore from "millions to more manageable thousands," according to Swift.

"We are providing more intelligent services for our customers," Swift says. "We’re taking advantage of the intellectual property to accelerate our product production."

Yet, before drugs go to market, there are still those thousands of molecules to consider, development and testing time lines and government approval to consider. So, it’s difficult to measure exactly how much the knowledge management tools accelerate that production, Swift admits.

Best practices

Pharmaceutical companies are using knowledge management as the basis for developing best practices, says Nick Semple, a managing consultant for PA Consulting. Market forces are leading them to adopt best practices and other management techniques that are used in other industries, but have been largely undeveloped in the pharmaceutical arena, Semple adds.

Many of today’s drugs are going off patent soon, meaning that they will be competing with lower-cost generics. So the large pharmaceutical firms are using knowledge management to ensure that different elements of the firm are working more closely internally, according to Semple. Enhancing collaborative efforts across departments is critical to being successful in improving best practice and similar management efforts.

The research arm of the industry is also enhancing its knowledge management efforts as the volume of available research continues to grow. "Pharmaceutical companies are looking at new methods to dispense drugs, whole new [internal and external networks] and ecosystems. There’s a huge need for technology to mine the large volume of information that’s available," Semple says.

That means using a variety of intelligent search engines that understand language semantics in order to gather all of the pertinent information—even if terminology differs from source to source. It also means searching across the globe for information published in different languages.

Beyond combining a variety of disparate information from a variety of different sources, as AstraZeneca is doing, the pharmaceutical firms are also using knowledge management systems to aid with the regulatory approval process, according to Semple.

Knowledge management systems help pharmaceutical firms track regulatory comments and monitor product development not only within a specific pharmaceutical firm, but also across "an ecosystem of partners," which is becoming more common in the industry as firms reach across corporate boundaries to develop new products, Semple says.

As the research, requirements and need for collaboration within the pharmaceutical industry continue to grow, so too will the need for knowledge management systems.