Big pharma backs new digitisation project
Major pharma companies including Roche, Astra Zeneca and Bayer have backed a new project that aims to help guide the industry towards a best practice for collecting and managing data.
The Pistoia Alliance’s FAIR Implementation Project will release a free toolkit by then end of 2019 to help companies implement the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for data management and stewardship. The project has been launched in response to the growing digitisation of the pharmaceutical sector; which requires practical guidance on how data and relevant metadata is captured and managed to foster greater collaboration and more effective partnerships.
The FAIR guiding principles were published in 2016 as a way to help companies cope with the daunting scale and complexity of data now being generated.
With many companies still struggling to implement the guidelines, The Pistoia Alliance’s FAIR toolkit aims to help organisations undertake their digital transformation, whether it’s making preparation for the Lab of the Future (LoTF) or to accelerate the application of AI. The toolkit will be launched through a free website and will include selected tools, best practices, training materials, use cases and methodology for change management.
“Roche’s overarching strategy is to become a data driven organisation, so we are very excited to help shape and lead on this project. We believe the FAIR guiding principles are vital in helping the entire life science ecosystem benefit from the data the sector is creating. Today, data assets are siloed, stored in varying formats, hard to retrieve and share, and are not interoperable – meaning the knowledge we have already learned can’t be utilised by and extended to a wider audience,” commented Dr Martin Romacker, principal scientist at Roche. “To follow the FAIR guiding principles is a big task for pharmaceutical companies to undertake, but we know everyone is in the same boat and there is no point undergoing this culture shift alone. The Pistoia Alliance is perfectly positioned to drive this change within the industry, and companies need to act with a sense of urgency to implement FAIR if we are going to realise the value of analytical methods such as deep learning based on high quality data.”
“As a pre-competitive consortium, the Pistoia Alliance is the right body to undertake this project to develop a FAIR toolkit for industry use, which is being supported actively by Pistoia member organisations. The FAIR toolkit will be designed to help industry to implement FAIR in a very practical way. This is because all life science organisations will need to take similar steps on this journey, so all will benefit from collaboration and sharing through this project” commented Ian Harrow, consultant at The Pistoia Alliance. “This freely accessible FAIR toolkit promises to help the life science industry to harness the explosion of data for much greater productivity in a timely manner.”