Digital Science Development Consortium

DSDC - Announcement | Introduction | Solicitation

Announcement

John Harman, Owner of Harman Solutions LLC - A veteran within the industry of drug discovery and development as a researcher and leader of scientific discovery and technology product is announcing this solicitation for the formation for an industry consortium to build a next generation of software for research and development operations (laboratory based experimentation and manufacturing) in life sciences - specifically those involved in drug discovery and development.

The current state of the consortium is:

A tentative name
A feasible product development plan
A governance and structural overview
A large industry problem to solve which has no current solution and imminent need for significant improvement

Introduction

“Digital Science” is a term used to describe a state where the physical operations of scientific discovery are planned and executed with a “digital mirror”, enabling operational excellence and observability in our decision making. Digital science uses the totality of the data from laboratory operations - people, samples, inventory, results - to provide an environment where the scientists who perform physical work are augmented by the laboratory software they use all day, every day. Lastly, “digital science” in practice provides FAIR+ data and traceability ubiquitously as implicit functionality NOT at the expense of the researcher's experience.

What Is DSDC?

DSDC (Digital Science Development Consortium) is a mission oriented industry consortium, formed of biotech and pharma members to build a comprehensive software platform to reduce the cost and improve the efficacy of informatics tools used to execute life sciences research and development.

Why Is This Needed?

The Product Need

The average biopharmaceutical researcher must use 10 to 30 different applications including LIMS, ELN, molecular design, vendor catalogs, sample requesting, procurement, data analysis and common office productivity applications routinely as part of their job function. Despite this, there are still significant gaps in synthetic planning across all molecular types, contextualizing experimental data, tracking decisions during research projects, and integration with laboratory instrumentation. This large tool portfolio has forced IT groups within drug development companies to add specialty data aggregation tools (“aka data platform”) and additional specialty resources in order to make their data available for regulatory reporting and to implement new AI and data science tools. The resulting (current) state which has evolved over the past 30 years of deprioritizing R&D operations has elevated operational expenses for drug development companies and fragile IT ecosystems which can not evolve with new scientific workflows.

The Consortium Need

As evidenced by the current state of R&D across industry, the past 30 years of internally developed bespoke solutions within biopharma and all commercial solutions in aggregate have failed.

Single company IT investments and the economics of commercial life sciences software business simply do not support the development of a product with broad capability, innovative and streamlined user experience, and a significantly reduced licensing/operating cost relative to today’s environment.

Alternatively, a consortium operating in a non-competitive group can build a clean, modern, technical debt-free product and seek sustainability revenue NOT profit.

Who is involved?

Members

The profile of invited members include any size of biotechnology, public institution, synthetic biology, biopharmaceutical company involved in discovery and development of materials or medicines or companies who operate scientific services businesses in support of these organizations. Multiple membership levels/types are publicly available and described in the overview document linked below, including:

Product Advisor (limited, invite only, no investment required)
Development Contributor or Development Partner (membership investment, future license credit, varying levels of product development involvement)
Board Member (membership investment, future license credit, board voting on decisions, unlimited access to product development efforts)
Commercial Partner (limited, invite only, no investment required, post-product release will be sales and/or delivery partner, limited involvement in product development)

Some example member organizations might be:

A mid-sized biotechnology company who desires reduced operating cost and/or increased use of data as an asset on a 3 year horizon.
A large pharmaceutical company who seeks to reduce operating expenses significantly and/or is beginning or struggling with a “digital transformation” project.
A contract research organization or CDMO who is positioned to invest in a mechanism to reduce operating expenses significantly on a 3 year horizon.
A contract or diagnostics lab who struggles to maintain training and validation and/or is planning to automate their laboratory operations over the next 3 to 5 years.
A biotech portfolio investment organization who wishes to eliminate the headache of “informatics startup infrastructure” in a bespoke way with each and every different company they launch.
A large core academic institution who needs to easily share data, reduce training of doctoral and postdoctoral staff operating the facility, and/or wishes to adopt global ontology standards easily.

Management

Harman Solutions LLC is willing to act as managing entity for the project; however, the DSDC board of directors may opt to create a new entity or enlist an alternate existing entity for management of the project and commercial ownership of the product.

How will this Consortium Solve Our Problem?

Build a new software product using different first principles

This project will provide industry with a single software platform which will replace the functions of existing operational software tools used in pre-clinical drug development; moreover, it will fill the most significant gaps in scientific workflow execution that exist today. Integrations with remaining IT ecosystem tools such as corporate business systems, complex analysis tools, and molecular design tools will be streamlined and simplified. This shrinkage of the R&D IT ecosystem will reduce the technical complexity and operational cost for industry.

In addition to cost reductions, among first principles for the software product is to accelerate the cycle time involved in planning and executing experiments, finding data, and making decisions. Whereas today, the multitude of tools are designed each to accelerate one step of the workflow or they are designed first to regulatory compliance and intellectual property at the expense of user experience.

In addition to a number of technology stack enhancements relative to today’s commercially available software, the product will fill several key gaps - items which have no viable market solution. These will be uncovered and validated in more detail as the project progresses; however, an initial list of capabilities for which scientists in industry have no solutions follows:

Multi-step synthetic planning of Nucleic Acids
Library design and enumeration for small molecules, nucleic acids, and proteins
Longitudinal studies and process design and execution
Commercial and internal inventory integration for small and bio-molecule synthesis
Ontology management
Lab Orchestration
Scientific User interface components (e.g. plate layouts, data analysis, high density data editing)
Real time human input and data analysis
On-demand granular data sharing / access management

Development

The strategy and tactics for product development can be described as “building a SaaS product using an anti-SaaS pattern”. The high level approach to the development will commence according to the table of objectives and deliverables found in the overview document linked below prior to commercialization. Concurrent effort is anticipated; however, development priorities will be subject to this prioritization.

Delivery & Commercialization

The delivery will occur first with the reference adopters from within the membership group.The delivery will be managed by the reference adopters with support from one or more 3rd party life sciences software services companies selected by the consortium to join as delivery partners.The commercialization of the developed product will commence after the scope of consortium development has been completed (and not before) in order to prevent any form of distraction from completion of the project funded by the DSDC.

solicitation

Please share this with as many people in your network as possible.
‍
Please review the more detailed overview.It includes more detailed information on the product to be developed and the membership types and benefits.

We need to change the tools we have in our industry to operate more effectively in our discovery of new medicines. Although there are several critical paths for us to pursue as an industry to do better, this consortium - with your support - can be the most significant state change to our industry.

This is a challenging but feasible objective which will have transformative value to industry:

It is large enough to matter when we are done
It is small enough to be possible
It is broad enough to impact many functional domains within drug discovery and development (and even expand beyond)
It is the right time - the pace of technology and the political landscape are demanding change NOW

Questions, Concerns & Feedback

This has not been done, might appear to be impossible, and you may be reading this and thinking “this guy is nuts”. Please at least give me the chance to change your mind so that we can change our industry in some meaningful way to improve our care for people in need of medicines.Please share your positive and negative feedback, comments and concerns, or support and relevant pain and suffering in your own industry experience using this formPlease follow and feel free to message the DSDC page on LinkedIn hereWatch for posts about new feedback and discussion. Also watch for posts announcing live discussion sessions for open Q&A.Please feel free to email me john@harman-solutions.com)directly.
All feedback along with any information shared will be posted to this websiteFrom this point forward, this project - whether it succeeds or it stalls - will be transparent to all through the mechanisms listed above.