What insights can be gleaned from these survey results?

Biotechs/biopharmas/pharmas are often engaging numerous diverse providers, which risks inconsistencies and inefficiencies when there are no standardized workflows or integrated CRO portals in place to securely and consistently capture and review project data.

Synthesis still represents the largest portion of outsourcing, which makes the tasks of target submission, compound upload, and secure registration highly important.

Growing reliance on service providers for work beyond synthesis will demand an end-to-end CRO-management solution that can capture all details and results from diverse types of outsourced projects and analyses. This will require an R&D platform that has the openness to acquire data from all the different types of speciality technology and instruments that internal and external researchers need; such a platform must prioritize data interoperability and seamless data exchange on the backend so biotechs can create a master data source that provides high-level insights across all their diverse projects.

Relatively low outsourcing of lab-based high throughput screening may signal a shift toward AI-based approaches, which will present new challenges for uploading virtual screening results into a united R&D data platform that serves as a single source of truth bridging in silico and lab-based exploration.

Timelines and budgets can be threatened by the data-and projectmanagement processes common in many outsourced projects.

Reliance on office-management tools to summarize and present results not only demands frequent touchpoints, but it also leaves the underlying R&D data stagnant and unavailable for secondary use. A client-CRO project portal, with real-time reports and repurposable data, could drastically reduce time spent preparing and reviewing reports, holding status-update meetings, and manually transferring or searching for data.

Data-exchange bottlenecks abound. Data capture, transcription, formatting, interoperability, secure transfer, collation, and reporting are all at risk within the current status quo processes; however biotechs and CROs alike are not well versed in the solution offerings available on the market and are instead getting by with workarounds and stopgap processes.

Conclusion

As the market’s first true end-to-end scientific R&D platform, Dotmatics has the power and flexibility needed to support a wide range of CRO collaboration needs within early small molecule drug discovery. From compound design and synthesis to screening, analysis, and registration, Dotmatics can help.