Blockchain Can Take Pharma Collaboration -- And Innovation -- To New Heights Posted on : Aug 13 - 2018

The idea that a company’s success depends on how much it can leverage the skills of its employees’ bright minds is rapidly becoming an outdated concept. Companies that are equipped with technologies for collaborating with a vast pool of global talent will build a competitive advantage.

Collaboration is essential for innovation and efficiency. Open source projects provide evidence that collaboration can create real value for professionals. Researchers in pharma can also tap into this success and drive innovation by collaborating with peers across organizations. On average, it takes about 12 years to bring a new drug to market. Collaboration can shorten the drug development time significantly by increasing the number of “aha” moments within a short period. Consequently, collaboration can save time, costs, and, ultimately, lives.

One great example of a collaborative effort in pharma is the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP), a partnership between the National Institutes of Health and various pharma and life science companies. The partners established the AMP in February 2014 to help relevant companies collaboratively identify promising biological targets for therapeutics. In January 2018, nine partners launched the most recent AMP project, which focuses on Parkinson’s disease.

Unlike some industries, pharma companies are not maximizing their capabilities to bring innovative products to market because they have not fully embraced the culture of collaboration. Researchers view themselves as the sole owners of their own data and carefully guard it. Even within the same company, researchers on different teams or departments may not be willing to share their research findings and insights with each other.

The Big Challenge: Intellectual Property Ownership

For pharma companies embracing collaboration, one big challenge deters them: how to protect their intellectual property rights while collaborating across companies. Intellectual property protections offer benefits for pharma companies, including guarding patents and protecting proprietary data.

Aiming to bridge the divide, my organization provides a blockchain solution that increases collaboration in the pharma industry by allowing researchers to share insights with one another in a secure and transparent way. View More