The Ferryman

The Pharma Industry as a Knowledge Zone

Debra Amidon, Founder and CEO of Entovation International, presented the following keynote on the KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub as part of the Integrating Knowledge in the Life Science Product Life Cycle Web conference. Please visit http://innovationwell.net/ for further details and to register to access.

The Pharma Industry as a Knowledge Zone

Knowledge zones are emerging rapidly as the next step in the quest for sustainable growth and economic development for cities, regions, countries, and even corporations and global virtual organizations. As the knowledge-based economy expands, stakeholders are finding this to be an appealing transformational pathway to a prosperous, diversified, and abundant future. The definition of a Knowledge Zone is: “A geographic region, product/service/industry segment or community of practice (e.g., with topical areas of interest) in which knowledge flows from the point of origin to the point of need or opportunity.” This session will outline the vision with examples within the Pharma industry for stakeholder innovation.

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
On Knowledge Management - The Ferryman: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/
KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub : innovationwell.net

Large-scale Social Learning Systems and Individual Identity

Etienne Wenger, world-leading expert on communities of practice, presented the following keynote on the KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub as part of the Integrating Knowledge in the Life Science Product Life Cycle Web conference. Please visit http://innovationwell.net/ for further details and to register to access.

Large-scale Social Learning Systems and Individual Identity

We live in unusual times. The world is rapidly growing smaller, interdependent, and unpredictable. We are facing daunting challenges—the establishment of a global yet diverse society, a fragile environment, economic imbalances, and regional conflicts to name a few. These challenges are neither simply local nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to worldwide learning systems. Understanding how to enhance our learning capabilities in this multi-dimensional nexus is taking increasing urgency. This seminar outlines a broad research agenda to produce a social learning theory for our times.


For further details please see: http://innovationwell.net/html/abstracts/etienneabs.htm

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
On Knowledge Management - The Ferryman: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/
KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub : innovationwell.net

Harvesting Life Science Data with Sun Microsystem’s Semantic Inferencing Search Technology

JohnRobert Gardner and Loralyn Mears, Sun Microsystems, presented the following seminar on the KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub as part of the Integrating Knowledge in the Life Science Product Life Cycle Web conference. Please visit http://innovationwell.net/ for further details and to register to access.

Tracking what you know, finding what you don't, putting it all together

Life science specialists have been trying to develop technologies which combine the capabilities for searching and comparing multiple ontologies with approaches for secure collaboration, but this is a challenging problem. After an extensive 10 year research effort, Sun Labs have produced a set of tools and methods for taxonomy management and mapping, with data-taxonomy linkage.

NOVA is a sophisticated, semantic inference, language-independent search engine embedded in a Portal solution based on open-standards. This facilitates automated trolling, harvesting, categorizing, organizing and distribution of data. Additionally, it facilitates invocation of services, based on specified roles, identity and entitlement - helping you determine what you know and what you don't, but limiting /who/ gets to know /what/.

NOVA is designed with patented semantic inferencing that recognizes new words (e.g., new proteins, peptides). It can relate them, in turn, to known nodes, with passage-retrieval so that your collaborators can be directed to the specific section(s) that you are calling attention to in the documents that you are sharing. This is all accomplished without the requirement to translate any documents into a single format or to house the digital assets within a single storage repository. Through efforts with our partners and customers that we will present here, the technology has been: extended to handle rapid knowledge growth; adapted for life science ontologies including GO & NCI Oncology - in OWL and RDF; and is scaling to > 100 TB of digital resource harvesting and management.

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
On Knowledge Management - The Ferryman: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/
KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub : innovationwell.net

Applying the Semantic Web to Drug Discovery (Eric Neumann, Aventis)

Eric Neumann global head of Knowledge Management for Aventis Drug Innovation and Approval presented the following keynote on the KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub as part of the Integrating Knowledge in the Life Science Product Life Cycle Web conference. Please visit http://innovationwell.net/ for further details and to register to access.

Applying the Semantic Web to Drug Discovery

Major challenges confront the pharmaceutical business at the economic, technical, and scientific levels. In order to maintain growth and drive innovation, it is necessary to utilize knowledge networks more effectively within an organization. Scientific research itself is predicated on the transfer and application of knowledge. The effective exchange of data and accompanying interpretation underpin the generation of new hypotheses and experimental designs. Aventis is exploring the use of semantic web technologies for sharing its knowledge assets. Examples of some of its applications across a broad assortment of scientific and technical processes will be presented.

There were also further presentations and a panel discussion on the topic of “Enabling the knowing of what we know with Ontologies and Semantic Web approaches” including Sheryl-Torr Brown, Pfizer, Susie Stephens, Oracle, and John Wilbanks, W3C Fellow.

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
On Knowledge Management - The Ferryman: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/
KM in Pharma & Life Sciences Hub : innovationwell.net

Intellectual property protection, portfolio growth, and management and licensing strategies

Andre Frieden, Avendia Law Group, chaired the following session on intellectual property, licensing & valuation on the KM in Life Science & Pharma CoP (http://innovationwell.net/). Please visit the site to access.

Intellectual property protection, portfolio growth, and management and licensing strategies

Andre Frieden, Avendia Law Group

This extended seminar will cover the following topics:

1. Overview of intellectual property (IP) protection

a. Patents for Therapeutics and Diagnostics
- Statutory requirements
- Recent developments in basic U.S. patent law
- Standards for examination applied by the USPTO to biotechnology developments
b. Patents for Bioinformatics and other health care software-based tools and systems
- Statutory requirements
- Recent developments in basic U.S. patent law
- Standards for examination applied by the USPTO to biotechnology developments
c. Trade Secrets in Biotechnology related developments
- Coverage of legal protection (in contrast to patents)
- Requirements and procedures
d. Trademarks for certain health care / biotechnology products and services
- Statutory requirements
- Recent developments in basic U.S. patent law

2. IP Portfolio growth and management strategies

a. Building a patent portfolio
b. Coordinating the management of diverse IP assets
c. Options for growth
d. Patenting strategies and enhance commercialization potential

3. Licensing Strategies

a. Determining/releasing restrictions on licensing
b. Risk management in licensing patents and trade secrets
c. Licensing agreements - the basics
d. Special provisions of licensing agreements

Independent, third party Valuation including IP portfolio

Patrik Frei, Venture Valuation

a. Understanding the basics of valuation

What are the essentials of a valuation of a high growth company, starting with the assessment of the soft factors:

1) management, 2) market, 3) sciences and technology. Based on this analysis, a risk assessment can be done which provides the basis for the financial valuation of a project or a company. There are several methods we have a look at including DCF, market and transaction comparable, and VC method.

b. Impact of IP on the valuation of a company

An important part of the valuation process is looking at the science and technology components. Within this part, the intellectual property (IP) protection and possibility to protect innovation is very important. We look at how the IP impacts the valuation of a company.

c. Optimizing the value with focus on IP

With the information of how the IP impacts the valuation of a company, the next step is to look at the possibilities to optimize the valuation with regard to science and technology and specifically that based on IP.

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Sciences CoP, innovationwell.net

Safety and Pharmacovigilance Issues in Product Knowledge Management

You can join Sidney Kahn, a leading pharmacovigilance expert to view presentations, and participate in discussions & conference calls around best knowledge management practices in Safety and Pharmacovigilance. Please visit http://innovationwell.net/ for further details and to register to participate.

This session covered:

You've found a safety signal - now what?

Sidney N Kahn, Pharmacovigilance & Risk Management Inc.

Signals detected by disproportionality of drug-event combinations are generally nothing more than statistical indicators of possible safety issues, and therefore require further analysis, validation, and evaluation of their clinical relevance. Signal strength per se does not necessarily correlate with medical significance. Strong signals may represent known, expected, and/or medically trivial adverse reactions, or confounding by treatment indication, common co-morbidities, or other common concomitant treatments, while weak signals may indicate rare medically important adverse drug reactions with a significant potential impact on benefit-risk balance.

This presentation will discuss follow up of identified signals, including:
· validity of the data used for signal generation
· assessment of clinical relevance of the signal
· organizational aspects of response to signals
· clinical/scientific response to signals (including additional information required for evaluation and assessment)
· possible regulatory impact

Cultivating Knowledge - Safety Hypotheses in the Product Lifecycle

Jim Averback, Life Science Integration Partners

Historically, Information Management in Pharmaceutical R&D has been designed to support what is essentially a uni-directional process. Beginning with compound or biologic discovery the process moves sequentially through optimization, manufacturing process development, non-clinical and clinical research, registration for approval to market and, finally marketing. At any point along this sequence, information about the drug and the technology to support management and application of such, tends to be designed with a targeted commercial drug indication in mind. Not surprisingly, as the work is carried out a body of knowledge about the compound/biologic grows in the form of observations with respect to its interactions, toxicity and alternative indications. Many of these observations remain as “hypotheses” and will not be formally tested as they may not appear to be relevant to the targeted indication. As a consequence, these hypotheses may be lost or at least “misplaced”.

In this seminar, we will look at how Information Technology and design of systems in Pharmaceutical R&D could be employed to manage these hypotheses. In particular, we will look at hypotheses related to drug safety and how Pharmaceutical R&D systems could help to integrate knowledge about the safe use of a drug over its lifetime.

Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect
www.douglasconnect.com
Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Sciences CoP, innovationwell.net