(415b) Pharmaceutical Informatics and New Financial Models of the Bio-Pharma Industry

In silico efforts to accelerate drug discovery and development, promoted with great fanfare at the dawn of the genomics era, have largely disappointed the decision makers in the R&D labs of the bio-pharma industry. Academics on the other hand, have greeted successive cyber transitions, e.g., from from Mega- to Giga-, and Giga- to Tera-, with new rounds of hype about accelerating the search for cures or implying implicitly that this time it will be different. Nevertheless, this speaker has reasons to believe that the next transition, from the Giga- to the Peta-scale eras, will really be different. These conclusions lead to some intriguing possibilities of new financial models to propel the R&D supply chain from university labs to the proof of concept, Phase II clinical trials.