The Top 8 Questions Directors of Large Molecule R&D Struggle to Answer

Roger Pellegrini

Want to answer these questions with informatics? Check out our comprehensive eBook on What to Look for in an Informatics Platform for Biologics R&D.

In the emerging modalities of large molecule R&D, it's especially difficult to keep track of progress and resource usage across programs and pipelines. We spoke with Directors of R&D across the industry to identify what's top of mind for them, and what they're struggling to answer with their legacy informatics.

1. What's the current status of each of my pipelines?

Sometimes, the most fundamental questions are the hardest to answer. But when your teams are working in Excel, PowerPoint, and outdated ELNs or LIMS, how can you get status updates on-demand?

2. What's the latest experimental data on each candidate?

Figuring out the status of your pipelines from a high-level is one thing, but getting the most up-to-date data on your candidates is an even more daunting proposition. You have to wait days or weeks for your reports to piece together a report.

3. Which targets or programs take up the most resources?

If R&D progress is top-of-mind, then resource usage is a close second. You can't justify progress if it comes at too high a cost, but you can't track costs if you can't track progress every step of the way.

4. Which modalities are the most successful at producing candidates?

Tracking the speed and cost of pipeline progress is key to making longterm decisions on the direction of your R&D. With legacy informatics, Directors of R&D can't always answer questions like, “Should we invest more in bispecifics, or more in CAR T?”

5. Are all my teams adequately resourced?

Setting your teams up for success is a core goal for any director. But allocating resources properly across biologics R&D teams is highly challenging, since many of which are working with different techniques or in different modalities. The processes behind bringing a large molecule to market are also often in flux, adding another layer of uncertainty to resource allocation.

6. Which teams are most productive?

Directors want to measure the effectiveness of resource allocation based on the productivity of their different teams. But when progress is being reported through PowerPoint, emails, and spreadsheets, measuring productivity is more guesswork than science.

7. Why is my project stalling?

Identifying bottlenecks is key to large molecule workflows, where processes need to be rapidly iterated on. If directors can't track R&D progress in real-time, they can't identify blockers until it's too late and a project has been stalled significantly.

8. Where is candidate attrition happening and why?

Unless you have a way to track the step-by-step progress of each candidate alongside experimental context, you can't identify trends across failed candidates. Directors can't extract overarching learnings if it's a struggle just to get data on each individual candidate.

You can't easily address any of these questions with scattered systems, legacy software, and tools that just weren't built for biologics. The only way directors of biologics can get these answers quickly, confidently, and reliably is with an informatics platform purpose-built for large molecule R&D.

Ready to answer these questions with informatics? Check out our comprehensive eBook on What to Look for in an Informatics Platform for Biologics R&D.

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