Drug Discovery: Technology Plays An Important Role

You think your company spends a long time planning projects and bringing new products to market? Try making drugs for a living.

Businesses such as Eli Lilly and Co. fight a constant battle to shave time from the excruciatingly long development cycle for new drugs. Time is literally money in this business; each day a new drug is kept from consumers can cost as much as a million dollars in lost profits.

A new drug typically will take 10 to 15 years to go from discovery to market. During that interval, pharmaceutical companies have to spend time perfecting the formula, testing its efficacy and safety, and getting regulatory approval.

Compounding the challenge is the limited amount of time that patents protect a drug. When researchers discover a drug that could potentially be useful, the company quickly patents it--and the clock starts ticking. Twenty years after that filing, the drug's patent expires, meaning other companies can copy its formula and sell generic versions. The long product-development cycle from patent to market can take more than a decade and means pharmaceutical companies often find their products have only a few years to make them money before the exclusive formula goes public.

To combat the epic production cycles and increase their profits, pharmaceutical companies increasingly rely on technology to shave off as many minutes, hours, and days as possible. By aggregating research databases, a pharmaceutical company CIO can slash the amount of time a scientist spends doing research. And by creating new software-analysis tools, CIOs can reduce the number of staffers needed and automate routine tests.

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