If you would like a prearranged meeting with a Tessella representative at the event, please email info@tessella.com

To find out more about this event visit http://www.drugdiscovery-summit.com/

Oxford, UK | 11 May 2012 Tessella, the international provider of science powered technology and consulting services is proud to announce that Unilever, the global fast moving consumer goods company, has extended by two years its framework agreement with Tessella to supply software services into its R&D organisation.

Vineet Bhalla, Unilever’s Global IT Director, R&D, said: “I am delighted with the extended agreement between Tessella and Unilever. Tessella has proven to be a key partner in the delivery of information and technology services to R&D and with this new agreement, remains an important part of our future journey.”

Lawrence Hopkins, Sector Director, Consumer Industries at Tessella commented: “We are really pleased that Unilever value the contribution Tessella is making to their innovative and challenging projects, and are looking forward to continuing to help Unilever achieve its ambitious objectives.”

Under this agreement, which has been in place since 2009, Tessella has been assisting Unilever in a number of key areas, including supporting scientific research by developing models and simulators, managing experimental data, and providing support for applications used by Unilever’s scientists.

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Notes to the Editor

About Tessella

Founded in 1980, Tessella is the international provider of science powered technology and consulting services. World leading organizations choose our unique blend of science, engineering and sector expertise to deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions to complex real-world commercial and technical challenges. Our people are high achievers from leading universities and are passionate about delivering value to clients.

Media Contact
Tessella
Christina Tealdi | Senior PR and Communications Manager
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453 | christina.tealdi@tessella.com

To find out more about this event visit: http://www.amstat.org/meetings

To find out more about ICA Congress 2012 or to register online, visit http://www.ica2012.com/index.php

By Andrew Chadwick and Tom Parke

Why isn’t value trusted?

Pharmaceutical R&D teams are distinctly uncomfortable about attributing value to an R&D project before proof of efficacy. Teams don’t see a drug as a tangible option until they have results that benchmark the new therapy against either current treatments, or, for treatment of unmet needs, at least reveal the critical information on patient tolerability. The trouble is that by the time the project reaches this stage, most of the dice have already been thrown.

One reason for this systematic lack of trust in value estimates is that retrospective comparison of forecasts and outcomes for peak sales show clearly that drug markets bring surprises, both pleasant (e.g. sales of Lipitor Ref. 1 ) and unpleasant (e.g. sales of Exubera Ref. 2)

Decision-making about project progression and conduct in early Development, or Discovery, is, or should be, affected by concerns about wasted cost when there is failure in late development – and so lack of trust in forecast market value is compounded by the fact that late failure is still unpredictable. This isn’t just a question of taking a bet in an area where there is a known risk of failure, since there is often also considerable uncertainty about the failure rate across a complete therapeutic or disease area.

Why is a view of value important?

Assuming that the aim of a pharmaceutical company is to maximise the value that it creates, then estimates of value enter inescapably into an optimised decision-making process. The key decisions are not just at the portfolio level about which projects to start or stop, but also at the level of optimising, within the conduct of projects and programmes, the right balance between cost, risk, value and time.

Even an averaged value is useful

The industry can improve performance, despite the random nature of much of its raw material, by systematically placing better bets and evolving ‘smarter’ R&D designs that make the best of the available information and build in basic business value thinking into planning of experiments and trials.

Even an average figure for value of a project, at a given stage of R&D, set against potential costs, can often help in reaching the best planning decision.

For example, in designing screening cascades, value estimates strongly enter the calculation of best cutoff, since the opportunity cost of false rejection is the eNPV (expected Net Present Value) for the option wrongly rejected, allowing for other independent risks further downstream in the process. The value impact of lost opportunities can be alarmingly high, when taken together with the modest predictive power of many Discovery methods and the natural human instinct to believe in and act on the most recent information (Ref. 3) .

Another need for eNPV estimates in decision-making on project conduct is where there is an option to invest in a way that can save time in development, e.g. adaptive clinical trial designs. For these assessments, the value of time saving is, in the simplest terms, the discounted worth of bringing value earlier. Then, if required, a more sophisticated view of competition might be added, that relates product value to order of market entry.

Differentiated strategies demand differentiated planning

Where companies are trying to find the right way to run each project for value, and moving away from fixed, monolithic processes, then again any estimates of difference in value between projects or programmes can inform objective, value-maximising decisions on where to take risk and accelerate, or to mitigate risks through a more staged chain of commitments. Factors leading to value differences between projects can include the use of personalised medicine, decisions to target rare diseases, and work that excludes or includes different regional markets and/or phenotypes.

The virtual research team has new commercial hand-offs

The third reason why valuations are inescapable comes from the trend to increased ‘virtualisation’ of R&D. Even for outsourcing decisions, cost becomes more explicit and has to be justified against the value that it adds. But where ‘virtual’ means buying in more research options, then good valuation can make the difference between long-run business success and failure.

The in-licensing transaction itself may have myriad associated options that need to be valued: for example, what extra de-risking information is it worth paying the provider to generate before you know the identity of the molecule; what de-risking work should you undertake before unconditional acceptance; what is the right structure of payments according to the value of resolving critical uncertainties?

So what’s to be done?

We have found that it helps them to show, preferably in a highly visual, interactive way, how sensitive the optimal decisions are to an estimate of value: where people see that information on value (or any other critical decision variable) makes a big difference to their long-run success, then they will start to care about getting a better handle on this information.

Value estimates are controversial. They are sorely needed, in the context of helping R&D teams make value-adding choices about the way forward, in a world where on average pharma R&D is failing to create net value. Better thinking and decisions above value can help effective innovation that yields the most consistent crops from the creators’ intellectual seedcorn.

• Modernising Oil & Gas Decision Support – Reducing business risk by capturing and sharing knowledge and expertise across the organisation.
• Valuing valuation in Pharma R&D – Trust in early pharmaceutical pipeline product valuation has all but evaporated, yet views of value are increasingly important in the drive to improve pharmaceutical R&D effectiveness. What is the cause of this paradox and what can we do to resolve it?
• Content Management and Archiving – Organisations are increasingly creating integrated systems to manage their live content as it is authored, approved, disseminated and deleted. They are also realising the need to retain information for long periods. How do you meet these requirements and create a whole life information management approach that provides information access whenever it is needed?

Times

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. ET / 14:00–15:30 UK time
1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m. ET / 18:00–19:30 UK time

Register Here

© Eli Lilly and Company

Oxford, UK | 26th April 2012. Tessella, the international provider of science powered technology and consulting services, is proud to be hosting a free online webinar featuring an Eli Lilly case study on Disseminating improved trial design using modeling and simulation.

Natalie Cheung Hall of Eli Lilly and Company will describe how they learned to effectively train their statistics function on the importance of trial simulations in designing both fixed and adaptive designs.

This discussion will help:

• Implement best practice trial modeling and simulation in your organization
• Explain the usefulness of simulation for optimizing both fixed and adaptive trial designs
• Educate your organization on clinical trial optimization

This free webinar is ideal for individuals from life science organizations in the functional areas of Research & Development, Modeling & Simulation, Clinical Operations, Biostatistics and Procurement.

The “Disseminating improved trial design using modeling and simulation, featuring an Eli Lilly case study webinar” will take place on Thursday 3rd of May at 3:00pm GMT (Greenwich Mean Time: Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, and London).

To register online for the event visit: http://tessella.adobeconnect.com/lillywebinar/

To share 30 years experience in Adaptive Clinical Trials, Tessella holds a number of these webinars throughout the year for all life sciences professionals interested in deepening their understanding of Adaptive Clinical Trials.

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Notes to the Editor

Natalie Cheung Hall has been at Eli Lilly and Company for 6 years.  She is an Associate Consultant Computational Statistician within the Advanced Analytics Hub working on the Clinical Trial Optimization team.

About Tessella

Founded in 1980, Tessella is the international provider of science powered technology and consulting services. World leading organizations choose our unique blend of science, engineering and sector expertise to deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions to complex real-world commercial and technical challenges. Our people are high achievers from leading universities and are passionate about delivering value to clients.

For further information visit our dedicated microsite on http://www.smarterclinicaltrials.com

Media Contact

Tessella
Christina Tealdi | Senior PR and Marketing Communications Manager
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453 | christina.tealdi@tessella.com

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