New article of IBI group at Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

Information technologies already have a key role in pharmaceutical research but achieving substantial advances in their use and effectiveness will depend on overcoming current challenges in sharing, integrating and jointly analyzing the range of data generated at different stages of the R&D process. These challenges are related to the complexity and heterogeneity of biomedical data, the need to establish relevant, widely accepted and openly available data standards and the lack of integration of knowledge from different disciplines and stages of the R&D process. Overcoming these challenges was the subject of a debate in Brussels on July 2013 with the participation of experts and stakeholders led by Ferran Sanz, Director of the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics.

The key points of the debate have been collected in the article “Integrative knowledge management to enhance pharmaceutical R&D” published in the prestigious Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. In the article, some initiatives to overcome these problems are discussed, which will be key for establishing knowledge management strategies in pharmaceutical R&D that efficiently exploit the increasing availability of novel biomedical data and learn from previous experience, thus enabling a more efficient search for innovative, effective and safe medicines.