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Pharmaceutical client seeks assistance in prioritizing its nanotechnology R&D strategy.
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Business impact In the rapidly evolving pharmaceutical industry, new advances in nanotechnology promise to revolutionize drug development and delivery methods. But for established industry giants, it can be difficult to know whether to take the lead in developing cutting edge technologies, or wait for others to jump-start the market before taking the plunge.
For assistance in making that decision, a top-five pharmaceutical company turned to IBM On Demand Innovation Services (ODIS) — a partnership between IBM Research and Global Business Services (GBS) — for an in-depth analysis of the nanotechnology field as it relates to the pharmaceutical industry. Consultants representing both GBS's Strategy and Change practice and its Life Sciences/Pharmaceutical practice worked with client executives to develop a strategy for exploiting the company's strengths in R&D and a roadmap to help guide future endeavors in the nanotechnology arena.
Issue Advances in biotechnology, genetics, nanotechnology and a host of other scientific fields will have a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry in the coming decade and beyond. Companies cannot afford to miss opportunities presented by this next wave of innovation, but prudent planning calls for prioritizing projects that are most likely to offer a significant and timely return on investment. A large pharmaceutical company recently sought assistance from IBM to understand the opportunities presented by nanobiotechnology — projected to be a $70 billion market by 2015, representing 20 percent of the overall nanotechnology market — and develop a strategy for targeting its R&D efforts to help gain a competitive advantage in a hotly contested market.
Executive summary After surveying the shifting pharmaceutical technology landscape, this multinational pharmaceutical company sought a strategy and roadmap to help guide its future development efforts. In response, IBM proposed a two-part process. First, IBM Research, working together with GBS, leveraged IBM's existing nanotechnology research and extensive in-house expertise to provide a framework to guide the process. The GBS Strategy and Change team then used IBM's Business Insights Workbench (BIW) tool, VentureSource, and a host of other third party research to search for existing pharmaceutical nanotechnology-related patents, VC funding, global government and academic funding, publications, and commercialized and pipeline drugs using nanotechnology — with the goal of determining which markets and therapeutic areas were already crowded with competition, and which ones offered a more promising opportunity for their client to stake out a beachhead.
What IBM did IBM's Strategy and Change team, composed of IBM researchers and GBS consultants, presented the pharmaceutical client with a set of frameworks and data for analyzing the future pharmaceutical nanotechnology market. The team identified five potential markets where nanotechnology could play a significant role in the pharmaceutical industry.
Using IBM Research's BIW tool, GBS consultants then explored the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) database to determine which markets offered the most promise for new entrants. BIW's ability to search both structured data, such as patent names, and unstructured data, such as molecules cited in descriptions of chemical compounds, provided an in-depth overview of where new investments might face fewer competitive challenges and prove most profitable. Together with the other analyses, IBM developed a matrix of opportunities presented by potential applications of nanotechnology in pharmaceutical development. It was determined that the potential impact of the opportunities range from pharmaceutical market game changers, to a host of enabling technologies for faster, more efficient drug discovery and development, to diagnostic technologies that will complement core pharmaceutical products.
Capabilities applied While many other consulting firms recruit outside experts to augment their consulting capabilities, IBM Research employs more than 3,500 scientists who take an active role in helping the client, guiding the analyses, validating findings, reviewing deliverables and conferring with clients' scientific experts. IBM Research's own groundbreaking work in nanotechnology provided a strong foundation for the pharmaceutical industry assessment, and its Business Insights Workbench offered a powerful tool for analyzing PTO's vast database of patent-related material and extracting meaningful information. In addition, the IBM Life Sciences/Pharmaceutical Strategy and Change practice has a successful track record in all areas of pharmaceutical companies' operations and an unrivaled focus on the industry's issues and visions. The practice provides a strong combination of business acumen, cutting-edge data mining tools, and scientific knowledge and insight that make it a major player in the business transformation arena.
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