DrugResearcher two-part special feature
Drug Discovery in profile: Dr. Tim Jaeger (part II)
spoke to Dr. Tim Jaeger, director of business development at iAS
interactive Systems, Germany. Here, Jaeger spoke about the future
of knowledge management and commented on the broadening role it
would have on drug discovery.
Drug research and development is currently facing a problem with data overload, which threatens to slow down productivity, if its management and interpretation is not efficiently dealt with.
Present day methods of interpreting this data have proved inadequate and there are real concerns, which were highlighted at the conference, that pharmaceutical companies are not fully extracting and understanding relationships between genes and diseases - the fundamental essence in drug discovery.
>iAS interactive systems is a company that designs, develops, installs and maintains systems for knowledge management in the field of pharmaceutical R&D. Since August 2003 Jaeger has been responsible for strategy and business development of research and knowledge services.
Jaeger received his M.D. and Ph.D. in 1997 and his MBA in 2004. Before joining iAS in 2002 he worked at the University of Heidelberg. He was heading the Research Services of iAS between 2001 and 2003.
His activities also include work in various committees and task forces including CDISC, DART, EHTEL and AFGIS.
With the prospect of declining R&D budgets, can you define how much of a factor this will be in the quality of validation?
"To me restrictions on budgets are a daily business in any industry. As a problem I think they are a challenge because if you use IT and knowledge management processes the right way they will deliver cost reductions."
"If you implement the tools and costs go up without a corresponding increase in value you have a problem anyway. Increasing budget cuts are a problem when it comes to specific project spending. It's the environment we live in and have to face."
What are the tools that are currently being used in knowledge management and what can we expect to see in the future?
"The most basic tool that pharma companies use is email or Google. However, when a scientist discusses the latest results of an experiment with another colleague, forming links and associations, one could say that is a knowledge management tool. The exchange of information."
"The concept of association and context is what directs you to potentially useful information. I think the next generation of knowledge management tools will have associative functionalities. This will be advanced to the point that for scientists in the area of pharmacogenomics, molecular biology and clinical research, information and molecular pathways specific to these fields will be easily searchable and customised."
"We will also see a shift from data-centred research to information-centred research. What we have right now is systems in place that have search facilities restricted to local drives and document management systems, or even warehouses that house data. Essentially you are forced to describe what you want."
"The future will see this shift from data-centred to information-centred research result in systems able to retrieve individual pieces of information out of documents, recombine them according to the context of your question and deliver these results to you. So an ideal application in the future will be able to combine internal data storages with database entries, database resources such as Medline, patent databases. In addition you will be able to combine that with your own personal notes."
Are you finding that pharmaceutical companies need more reasons for validation of targets, especially now that budgets are becoming smaller?
"It depends. If you take two or three of the biggest pharmaceutical companies it would really depend on its working culture. You have to go through a massive project approval process, all kinds of calculations. Sometimes if it fits into the culture, you get a goal and a lot of money associated with that goal without doing much work."
"One and a half years ago we started a project with Sanofi-Aventis. Part of the project involved showing them a presentation, no functional piece of IT. They believed in the value proposition that we made and as a result we collaborated on this project."
Do you think that the range of services you provide at iAS interactive systems will grow in popularity in the near future?
"I wouldn't be here otherwise! Although I think it has an absolute future, we will not develop an application that solves all the problems for everyone. We will have some organisations that will benefit from the solutions and we will have others, which the tools will simply not align in the company's culture."
"Large pharma is very responsive to what we do and we have a great deal of support from the German government."
Finally, are you noticing an increase in the number of companies that provide the same IT solutions as you do?
"We had quite a few blue chip IT companies come and talk to us and conclude that our product was even more mature than its own projects in their research labs. I would not say that there is no big company out there doing what we do. I just have not found one."
"As we combine the linguistics and semantics, neurobiology and mathematics, you will have companies that do ontology-based research, Google could well become a specialised search engine. All these could be considered competition in each segment but the combination of all these technologies into one piece of simple software, I believe, is not out there."
