Knowledge-sharing platforms emerge from life science research collaboration

Meanwhile Bunin's company, Collaborative Drug Discovery, provides a home in the cloud for distributed teams that need to securely share data. Many of them are budget-sensitive labs in startups with venture funding or academic researchers. "These groups have no choice but to collaborate," Bunin says. "Previously they may have been tracking their data in Excel files. We offer them valuable data mining tools."

For instance, several groups of neuroscience researchers, all funded by the National Institutes of Health, use CDD as their data hub. "Each has different biodata, and each can invite whoever they want to collaborate, and NIH can see it all," Bunin explains. Each project's data vault has an administrator who can dictate which data each member can see. "We offer a software-as-a-service subscription model," he says. "We don't own any of the intellectual property, but if our technology can be the catalyst for collaboration around ideas, that creates a virtuous cycle."

TransCelerate's investigator site portal

In yet another example of industry collaboration, 10 biopharmaceutical companies announced in September that they have formed a nonprofit organization to accelerate the development of new medicines. They have launched TransCelerate BioPharma Inc.to identify and solve common drug development challenges and accelerate the development of innovative therapies, while eliminating R&D inefficiencies, starting with the clinical trials process.

The 10 companies include: Abbott, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Genentech a member of the Roche Group, and Sanofi.

A TransCelerate spokesperson says the Philadelphia-based organization is developing an investigator site portal, a shared, cross-industry investigator portal designed to streamline investigator and site access through harmonized delivery of content and services. The portal will offer a central point of access and single sign-on for investigators and site staff.

Another effort, in partnership with the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium, is to develop industrywide data standards in priority therapeutic areas to support the exchange and submission of clinical research and metadata, improving patient safety and outcomes.