Pfizer's Prescription for Data
Information Management Magazine, April 2009
Michael Linhares, Ph.D. and Research Fellow, Pfizer
Ever since the invention of aspirin in 1897, the pharmaceutical industry has been among the most complex and competitive arenas in the corporate world. Today, billion-dollar outcomes rest on the success of unique drug breakthroughs, their shelf life and the pipeline of new products that will replace them as old patents expire.
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But the constant undertow of any major project is time to market, the core competency that becomes critical where projects are large, extremely expensive and intertwine scientific and business interests over extended time frames.
Nowhere is this process more intensive than at Pfizer, the world's largest drug manufacturer, where $7.5 billion is poured annually into research and development. At Pfizer, as many as 100 commercial projects are taken up annually, of which about five are likely to eventually reach market. Moreover, the timeline for a single successful drug project might be anywhere from eight to 10 years, and a blockbuster might arrive on pharmacy shelves with a 10-figure accumulated cost.
Regulatory and safety approvals take their course, but operational efficiencies are always under a spotlight. "If you bring a $12 billion product like Pfizer's Lipitor to market a month early, you have potentially captured $1 billion in lost revenue," says Dr. Alan Louie, research director at IDC subsidiary Health Industry Insights. "But no one actually does that because most products fail in development. For the very few that succeed, you've pretty much done everything you can, but you probably haven't done it in the most efficient manner."
At Pfizer, efficiency was hobbled by the fact that updated research data was isolated in spreadmarts, tables of Excel data on individual computers that were inaccessible for sharing. So, the company's Business Information Systems team devised a plan to federate Pfizer's data with enterprise information integration tools.
Time to Information
Time to market can be expressed as time to information, where consistent, accurate and timely data is essential to avoid costly missteps and delays, which, by estimates from Pfizer, can add up to $10 million per day.
For Michael Linhares, these challenges are all in a day's work. Linhares arrived at Pfizer in the mid-1990s as a drug metabolism scientist (see Sidebar: The New IT Specialist, below). Today, his title is Ph.D. and research fellow, but his job is to head up Pfizer's BIS team of three scientists/information delivery specialists who expedite information and assist business units with portfolio management services for the many projects underway at the company.
Linhares' customers are Pfizer's Pharmaceutical Sciences (PharmSci) teams of businesspeople - who are also scientists, chemists, clinicians or engineers in their own right - who develop commercial processes for drugs, support manufacturing processes and manage a multitude of budgets and activities as drugs advance through development.
Dry as this might sound, it's an interesting mess that Linhares walked into. Blessed with scientific skills and an intellect that led him into informatics and back, Linhares lately found himself among colleagues confronting legacy data traps common in the pharma industry. The most obvious of these was a proliferation of spreadmarts, one-off, manually entered Excel builds for ad hoc queries. These silos of information were necessary to projects but unshared among working teams across the business.
"Even as a scientist, part of me has always felt an experiment is not done until your data is in the database where you can share it with everybody," say Linhares. In his BIS role, not just sharing data, but ensuring data quality, consistency and transparency became the goals. "We had a variety of scattered experts in different areas, but what we needed was a single integrated data source so, for example, everybody who needs to know where a budget stands has access to the same numbers, which cuts down on confusion in a big way."
As a matter of business, Pfizer maintains a global information factory and data repositories for financial reporting and for FDA-regulated manufacturing, supply chain and packaging processes.
Formal, repeatable reports are also part of PharmSci team resources, but were inevitably backed up by spreadmarts. Linhares' task became to hack away at those desktop silos and replace them with agile processes that would let teams react and change direction as new facts were uncovered and incorporated into the complex analysis required for drug development. Pfizer's data warehouse, enterprise project management, inventory and supply chain, portfolio and project management systems are all sources of information used by PharmSci teams, but were often inaccessible to them in any timely way.
This presented a challenge very unsuited for static reporting. "What really benefits our business is simply listening to people who are in desperate need of information," Linhares says. "You find that many of their questions have never been asked before and are unlikely to be asked again."
Customer Needs
One of Linhares' customers who already recognized the pitfalls of spreadmarts is Dr. Karl Bratin, a research fellow at Pfizer who leads a PharmSci team in the areas of commercial process development and manufacturing.
In some cases, Bratin's team develops whole new technologies that might be inhalation devices, drug delivery patches or new formulations for biological processes that require a great deal of learning and development. His role makes him a data provider, a data tracker and a data consumer.
"Sometimes we have to invent science, and things can change very rapidly in that environment," Bratin says. "In my world, spreadsheets are only good at the moment you close them. Information is almost immediately out of date because somebody else has a new piece of data."
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