Planning Drug Discovery Projects

Drug discovery has always been a risky, time consuming endeavour. We're all familiar with the statistics: 9 out of every 10 drugs fail to make it to market; $2.6Bn to get a successful drug to market. Add to that the fact that the capital markets have made funding more challenging over the past couple of years, and you have an increased focus on productivity and capital efficiency

Planning and tracking drug discovery projects has never been more critical. At the recent Why Summits Biotech & Pharmaceutical PPM conference, we looked at the current tools on the market, and talked with both Research and Development PMs to see what the current challenges were.

Here's what we found:

• Research PMs tend to use generic tools project management tools to plan their projects and/or Excel. These tools aren't biology or chemistry centric. In some cases, the tools are used to look at a projects potential future value, or other financial aspects of a drug development program, but don't help you understand the science behind either the potential value of a project, or potential risks.
• Plans aren't automatically updated as the work is being done. For example, if a plan says that a particular assay is scheduled to be completed by May 1st. When the scientist completes the assay, the plan is not automatically updated. If the scientist is working at a CRO, their work is largely disconnected from the rest of the work performed by the internal team. Status updates are often communicated via email, and must then be manually updated in the project plan by a project lead, or PM.
• The tools aren't designed to keep team members informed of progress being made, or impediments to progress. In an endeavour where collaboration is key, keeping everyone on the same page is a critical success factor.
• The plans aren't often connected to the goals (scientific questions) that the team is trying to answer. There's no traceability between the questions and activities required to answer them.
• The tools let you see a plan, but they're not really used to help you track your progress against the plan, and manage communication with both internal team members and CRO partners.
• The tools used to create the plan are disconnected from the tools used to manage the work. For example, if you need to create a protein target form for a screening campaign, you can create the task in the planning tool, but that task isn't connected to the tool used to manage the protein request and its workflow. The end result is that data are often input into 2 or more systems in order to both plan a task, and manage that task through to completion.
• And while you can create a plan, the tool can't tell you if the plan is currently feasible or what you will need in order to complete it. For example, if you create an assay plan, it's not connected to the inventory system so that you can determine if you have the materials necessary to execute those assays, or let you calculate the total amount of protein or compound that you will need for your plan.

All of these disconnects have a negative impact on productivity, and make it harder to set expectations and communicate effectively across the team.

During the conference, I showed the latest pre-release version of Pipeline's Planning Module to some of the attendees to get feedback and discuss needs. The planning module allows research PMs, and scientists to create project plans from a series of pre-defined templates. As with everything else in Pipeline, the templates themselves are highly configurable.

The module will support the following types of plans:

• Target Product Profile (TPP)
• Target Candidate Profile (TCP)
• GRIDALL plans - taking some cues from Joe Stalder 's book Project Management for Drug Developers we've added support for GRIDALL (Goals, Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions and Lessons Learned).
• Assay Plans
• Assay Cascades

In upcoming posts I'll talk about how each of these different types of plans can help you reduce risk, and manage your drug discovery project more effectively.

If you'd like to learn more about Pipeline and the upcoming release of our Planning Module, reach out to Eric Robbibaro for a demo.