Companies Team up to Accelerate Market Readiness of Drug Development Programs

A new service offered by a pair of New York-based companies, H1 and Innovatively, is being touted as a tool that can help life science companies cut the time it takes to take a product through the clinic and into market in half.

If the DaVinci System works as promised, it’s a product that could save tens of millions of dollars in research and development. H1 and boutique life sciences consulting company Innovatively, teamed up on the development of the DaVinci system.

The DaVinci system repurposes existing research data found across the globe in disparate sources to help companies accelerate their strategic planning and improve their strategies. The system evaluates therapeutic areas and identifies where a life science company may have an unfair advantage; helps expand the company’s development pipeline by identifying and evaluating potential assets to in-license; and supports new product planning with competitive intelligence, the companies said.

Launched as a new “strategy as a service” offering, the DaVinci service helps companies with three key tools. The system can help companies define the market landscape through a “comprehensive picture of products and patient needs in your market.” It can provide competitive intelligence that can anticipate market shifts. The third key is an opportunity identification. The DaVinci provides a way for companies to harness the data to “zero in on the most promising targets across the unmet need, pathway, or technology by systematically evaluating the universe of potential targets.”

An Nguyen, Innovatively’s chief executive officer, pointed out that on average, it takes about 10 years for a drug company to bring a medication to market. That’s with a cost of about $2.5 billion. The DaVinci system, she told BioSpace, will help biotechs and life science companies leverage a large amount of data and narrow targeted opportunities down from more than a thousand to something like a top 10. Ngueyen said that can be accomplished with the DaVinci system and can be done at a fraction of the time and cost it would take using traditional methods.

“With that data in hand, our clients can then hit the ground running in the most promising markets with much less risk,” she said.

Ariel Katz, the cofounder and chief product officer of H1, said the idea of the DaVinci system was to help pharmaceutical companies better access and leverage the vast amounts of data to help with drug development programs. Because there are so many data points to track, more than 200,000 articles published and 9,000 clinical trials updates in September alone, Katz said information has been difficult to track and access.

“It’s almost impossible to keep up with the literature now,” Nguyen added.

The DaVinci system leverages machine learning technology to quickly find relevant data, analyze it for clients and distill it down to what’s most important so they can make decisions more quickly – a more holistic view of the existing market and data pools.

That more holistic view, Katz and Ngueyen said, provides companies with a keen look at the existing market and can help executives decide early on if an investment in a drug product may be worth it. The technology platform provides data that takes a broad look at the current landscape and can “connect a lot of key points” in the data pools. As an example, Katz said a company may have a platform that can potentially target a pulmonary disorder. The DaVinci system can connect the massive amounts of available data to let a company know if it can “run through early stage trials quickly.”

Nguyen added that it is virtually impossible for strategy teams to keep up with the amount of available data. The DaVinci system though, provides those teams the information they need in order to keep up with the data trends, she said.