Many large organizations now flex their research capacity and capability by outsourcing drug discovery and development to specialist global contractors, bringing new challenges and creating new opportunities.

Outsourcing essentially creates a virtual organization composed of the sponsor and multiple partners. This new way of working produces multiple communication and management demands, such as the need to preserve intellectual property without limiting information flow and tracking project progress across all participants.

In this post, we look at how Signals Synergy, from Revvity Signals Software, makes global virtual operations a real-world success.

New ideas, new challenges 

Large research organizations have been instrumental in developing the virtual approach, learning lessons from industry and commerce about outsourcing, offshoring, and partnering as ways to add capacity and increase business flexibility. In addition, contractors may offer specialized expertise that the sponsor does not possess in-house.

Similarly, to reduce or avoid the capital costs associated with owning and operating research laboratories (including expensive analytical instruments), start-ups typically run ‘benchless’ research programs — and this is especially true of start-ups in the biomedical field. While enabling rapid creation of new projects, these agile approaches also introduce novel challenges. 

Previously, data and workflow management could be tightly controlled from within a single organization, whereas programs with multiple external partners will use very different processes. The change from purely internal processes to an outsourced development and discovery model magnifies critical data and workflow management issues.

Administration that formerly involved only internal processes now must deal with the dynamic outsourcing environment, with constant turnover of people and projects, and managing this environment of continual change can become complex and time-consuming.

Similarly, sharing ideas and collaboration with global teams for new drug designs will require services and common workspaces that are both secure and easy to access.

On the same theme, intellectual property must be protected. Contractors will be working on products that may one day become highly valuable assets, and it is essential to balance information flow against the need to secure intellectual property.

In many cases there will be multiple outsourcing partners, often working on dozens of projects, which can produce a complex web of dependencies. Without a comprehensive overview, progress and delivery status can easily be lost.

To resolve these challenges and share information, sponsors and contractors often rely on email, spreadsheets, and PDFs. While manual processes can deliver operational success, unstructured data can be difficult to search, hindering analytics and visualization.

As capability grows, so does complexity

As the number of contractors increases, ensuring that the process operates as an integrated workflow becomes increasingly difficult. Managing the challenges presented by different data formats and diverse management tools can occupy significant time and resources, preventing high-level insight into progress and reducing the ability to identify and resolve problems to help improve efficiency. In addition, disjointed processes can easily allow valuable information to be unnecessarily or accidentally exposed, leading to regulatory and commercial risks.

The solution is to introduce an information hub that provides a unified view of the workflow and offers centralized data management. By enabling processes that involve multiple contract partners to be seen as a connected whole, managers can highlight bottlenecks and find solutions to help reduce costs and increase production efficiency.

More insight, less oversight

Signals Synergy, from Revvity Signals Software, provides a trusted data steward and project management layer between sponsors and CROs, and delivers the essential communications services for this new way of working. Signals Synergy is designed to provide secure, reliable communications and project management services for sponsors and contract partners, reflecting the way drug development research programs are shifting towards this nimble, agile methodology.

Seamlessly integrating with Signals Notebook or Signals Research Suite, Signals Synergy adds fit-for-purpose capabilities designed to facilitate external collaboration with CROs and optimize drug discovery project management and data management. For example, a start-up can assemble a workflow chain of specialist labs to test ideas and processes without the cost and delay of deploying, funding, and managing internal systems. Similarly, established organizations can increase capacity and extend their global reach by connecting remote partners, and scaling test processes in each geography according to demand.

Signals Synergy simplifies administration, such as user provisioning and deprovisioning for multiple partners, and provides shared ideation workspaces for capturing drug designs and hypotheses. The Signals Synergy environment also delivers built-in masking of proprietary codes, properties, and material IDs to help preserve intellectual property, alongside scientifically minded tools for tracking collaboration progress.

As a system-level expansion to Signals Notebook or Signals Research Suite, Signals Synergy provides comprehensive data exchange services. The automated transformation of unstructured CRO, CMO, and CDMO reports removes the difficulties of extracting data from emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs, and creates structured data ready for analytics and visualization that will help to identify bottlenecks, improve processes, and highlight areas for development.

Empowering critical insights from outsouring arrangements

Creating virtual research organizations is now the new normal, and Signals Synergy provides cloud-native support for a highly agile way of working. By empowering scientists and decision-makers to gain critical insights even from complex outsourcing arrangements with external contractors, Signals Synergy, from Revvity Signals Software, can help power the next generation of insights.

By choosing Signals Synergy with its dedicated sponsor-contractor workflows, drug discovery and research organizations can ensure intellectual property protection, enable efficient and effective communication, and harness the collective expertise of the sponsor and contractor partnership.

To find out more about how Signals Synergy can ease the pain of data integration, click here now.