Deep Dive: R&D Disruption

With costs skyrocketing and return on investment plummeting, R&D arguably needs disruption more than any other area of the industry.

Luckily it seems pharma is starting to wake up to this fact, and some of the industry’s brightest minds are focused on finding solutions.

Much of this disruption, of course, comes in the form of digital innovations – such as TREND Community, which uses social listening to identify unmet needs in rare diseases, or nQ Medical, who are monitoring how people type on their smartphones to gather insights on Parkinson’s disease. You can read both of their stories in this issue.

But R&D disruption can also come in the form of shakeups to an organisation’s structure, focus or ways of working. This issue we hear from AstraZeneca’s CVRM lead Joris Silon and Takeda’s R&D COO Georgia Keresty about how their companies are evolving to meet new drug development needs. And we have an exclusive interview with Oxford University’s Chas Bountra, who is spearheading an open-source approach to drug development by freely sharing discoveries with the wider life sciences community.

Elsewhere in the issue, Katie Lucero from Medscape explains how new approaches to medical education can help HCPs keep up with the rapid changes in lung cancer treatment; Professor Geoff Hall, patient experience expert Jacqui Gath and IQVIA’s James Anderson look at innovative approaches to improving research with NHS data; and experts from OPEN Health discuss how to improve communications around rare diseases.

I hope you enjoy the issue.

Kind regards,
George

George Underwood – Editor, Deep Dive: R&D Disruption