The paper identifies that while company rules, processes and systems seek to foster objectivity, common biases in decision making may hinder achievement of best possible performance. Psychological research proves again and again that people are bad at making complex decisions where there is risk involved. The paper demonstrates how better individual and team decision-making within drug discovery would enhance R&D performance. Feedback on problem solving performance could be one of the simplest measures to improve selection of compounds and effective screening sequences. The study also highlights that computational tools provide a more scientific approach that encourages objective consideration of all of the available information, helping scientists make decisions that are both balanced and rational, in the domains of library design, compound selection, screening, profiling and experimental design.

Drug discovery leaders receive much conflicting advice on possible ways to improve productivity and restore the rate of successful drug launches. Continuing technology investment, outsourcing of shared services and formation of smaller, disease-specific units, which bring researchers closer to clinicians are all current trends. However, senior management cannot afford to ignore the human dimension – are their teams making the best possible decisions given the information available to them, or that could be available given the right experiments?

Dr. Andrew Chadwick, Principal Consultant, Tessella, explains, “Past experience shows that many practical researchers remain baffled or confused by probabilistic models and so shy away from formal decision analysis. Yet reliance on gut instinct tends to lead to consistent patterns of mistakes. Discovery groups need to define and encourage ‘best practice’ to conduct projects in a way that captures wider company and industry experience. There is a need to make this as simple and accessible as possible via a more scientific approach.”

Good decision-making is central to drug discovery success and the new paper demonstrates that the interactive software platform, StarDrop from Optibrium, can help drug discovery scientists to guide their scientific judgment to make decisions with greater success. Dr. Matthew Segall, CEO of Optibrium, explains, “StarDrop can help drug discovery scientists to guide their decisions while designing and prioritising molecules with the aim of achieving an optimal balance of properties. The probabilistic scoring approach, employed by the StarDrop software platform to guide compound selection decisions in drug discovery, indicates the likelihood of success of a compound against a set of property criteria, given the available property data for that compound and taking into account the underlying uncertainty in the data.”

The intuitive software provides a decision-making framework, offering advantages over traditional predictive modelling platforms as it specifically helps users to identify chemistries with a high chance of success and focus expensive in-house resources. Used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies and research establishments globally, StarDrop guides compound selection and design decisions in all stages of drug discovery. The software provides a comprehensive range of features to support design and prioritization of high quality compounds including: probabilistic scoring; chemical space and glowing molecule visualisation; ADME QSAR models; P450 metabolism models and automatic model building.

To learn more about how StarDrop can aid good decision-making in drug discovery please call Optibrium on +44 (0) 1223 815 900, email info@optibrium.com or visit www.optibrium.com.

About Optibrium Ltd

Optibrium (www.optibrium.com) is dedicated to providing software to guide decisions involving complex, uncertain data in an intuitive way. Optibrium’s primary product, StarDrop, is focused on the drug discovery industry, helping scientists to guide decisions in the design and selection of high quality drug candidates. Optibrium was founded in 2009 as a spin-out of one of Galapagos service divisions: BioFocus. The founding group was responsible for the development of StarDrop from 2003 and, prior to this, research and development of related technologies since 1994. Based in Cambridge, UK, Optibrium has a global customer base ranging from top-ten pharmaceutical companies to small biotechs and academic groups.

For further press information please contact: Sarah Evans, The Scott Partnership, 1 Whiteside, Station Road, Holmes Chapel, Cheshire CW4 8AA, UK Tel: + 44 1477 539539 Fax: +44 1477 539 540 E-mail: optibrium@scottpr.com

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media contact

Christina Tealdi
PR/AR Executive | Tessella

D: +44 (0) 1235 546 638
M: +44 (0) 779 934 6453

E: christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Better individual and team decision-making should enhance R&D performance. Reproducible biases affecting human decision-making, known as cognitive biases, are well understood by psychologists.  These threaten objectivity and balance and so are credible causes for continuing unpleasant surprises in Development and high operating costs…read more

• What are the major conclusions of the guidance?
• How does the guidance affect the future of clinical design?
• Is it positive or negative for adaptive designs?
• What role does Bayesian play in the guidance…if any?
• What role, if any, does simulation play in the guidance?
• Why has Phase III been so clearly differentiated from earlier phases in the guidance?

Play the webinar

08:00 (PDT) 11:00 (EDT) 16:00 (BST)  17:00 (CEST)

Join Tom Parke as he quizzes adaptive trial gurus Prof. Don Berry and Dr. Scott Berry on the implications of the recent FDA Guidance on Adaptive Design for Clinical Trials. Tom will be getting answers to the key questions the guidance raises, namely:

• What are the major conclusions of the guidance?
• How does the guidance affect the future of clinical design?
• Is it positive or negative for adaptive designs?
• What role does Bayesian play in the guidance…if any?
• What role, if any does simulation play in the guidance?
• Why has Phase III been so clearly differentiated from earlier phases in the guidance?

Over 2 days, the comprehensive and scientific conference programme will feature key note addresses, case study presentations, panel and roundtable discussions of over 45 senior level industry speakers from leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology organisations as well as academia covering the following hot topics:

• R&D strategies and business models and pharma/biotech alliances collabroations
• Medicinal chemistry/drug design
• Screening techniques and assay development
• Biomarkers and personalised / translational medicine
• Bioinformatics
• Biologics

Dr Andrew Chadwick, Consultant (Life Sciences and Healthcare)  at Tessella will be giving a solution provider presentation on the Rational Approach to Risk Reduction: What can discovery screening planners learn from volcanos and dust detection, on Wednesday 6th June 2010, covering the following topics:

• The purpose of screening and the principles of value-adding screening plans
• The importance of finding the right, tailored screening plan for each project
• Risk perception and the pitfalls of cognitive biases for decision-making
• Metrics that should guide the choice, sequence, combinations and cutoffs for tests
• Ways of balancing the important factor (downstream consequences of error, cost and time for screening, and predictive performance)
• The need to overcome the challenge of uncertain inputs
• What is the right balance between exploitation and exploration of product options and technology performance?
• Effective approaches to supporting learning and continuous improvement

To find out more about this event or to register online, visit http://www.drugdiscovery-summit.com

Oxford, UK | 14 April 2010. Today, Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments previewed clinical trial design software that addresses the challenge of designing Phase 1 trials for combination therapies. Tom Parke, head of clinical technologies at Tessella, presented the prototype version at CHI’s combination therapies conference in Philadelphia, PA.

The development of combination therapies is becoming increasingly common in oncology, but currently development teams are limited to traditional Phase I clinical trial designs that only allow them to evaluate changing the dose of one of the agents, keeping the dose of the other agent fixed. This is incredibly limiting, significantly reducing the combination options that are explored, quite possibly missing combinations that offer greater therapeutic value for no increase in the level of toxicity. For a combination of two drugs there will be a series of combined doses which generate the same level of toxicity.  What the “Combination Finder” trial design allows the drug developer to do is find the full range of combinations that could be taken forward to further trials.

“A clinical trial seeking to determine the Maximum Tolerated Dose must use as few patients as possible, avoiding either wasting subjects on too-low combinations or too-high toxicity combinations – these would not only be poor for the patients in the trial, but also not as informative from the drug development program as placing subjects on combinations just below the limit of tolerability.” said Parke. “Designing these kinds of trials is particularly challenging, and basing our tool on some published work at MD Anderson, University of Texas and the University of North Carolina we believe our prototype will allow the industry to assess how close we are to having a practical solution.”

Tessella plan to work with existing users of Tessella & Berry Consultants FACTS™ clinical trial design software, as well other leading pharmaceutical companies to refine the functionality of the prototype. If successful the capability could be integrated into the next release of FACTS scheduled for September.

-Ends-

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media Contact

Tessella
Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Established in 2003, the award programme recognizes teams in industry and academia for their outstanding innovations and excellence in the enabling uses of technologies, practices, solutions, and novel business strategies that will advance drug discovery, development, biomedical research, and clinical research and trials.

To find out more about the awards ceremony visit http://www.bio-itworld.com/bp_awards.aspx