 "We want to be like oxygen to AstraZeneca and then we can focus on innovation: David Smoley")
UK-based Astrazenaca, the seventh largest global pharma player, has been focusing on the drug discovery research and using Information Technology to speed up the processes, as its model to fight the challenges faced by the large multinational pharmaceutical companies in the recent past. The company, which started a restructuring last year, has appointed David Smoley from Flextronics as Chief Information Officer to lead the IT plans. It is currently reducing IT outsourcing and consolidating the works by setting up three global technology centres, starting from one in Chennai, which was launched on Tuesday. The IT division, which is working on reducing the time and cost for drug discovery, wants to become the oxygen of the company in future, says Smoley, in a conversation with Gireesh Babu. Edited excerpts:
How important is the Global Technology Centre (GTC) in India for AstraZeneca?
The office in India gives us a centre of gravity. Today we have IT people spread around the world and it is hard to have a centre of gravity. Chennai gives us a centre of gravity, because, in one location we will have a large number of IT people sitting together. Today, with our dispersed AstraZeneca locations, people don't sit together. With our eight different third party vendors, people don't sit together. The Centre gives us a place where we all sit together. Teams can be more effective, more highly collaborative and smaller and less costly and have good technical skills.
What would be the benefit of GTC for the company in future?
We want to be more than twice as good for half the cost. The GTCs will enable us to be better at recruiting the right skills, maintaining them growing those guys from entry level up through senior level, having a career path, being part of the global organisation. Agility is important going forward. We have to have a workforce which is open to new ideas, new technologies, training and learning and also bringing in new people quickly and easily. Thats hard to do in lot of the western world, but it is much easier to do in India and other emerging markets. The second GTC would be set up in San Fransisco in 2015 and the third probably in Eastern Europe in a couple of years. We need the ability to scale up rapidly and to shift to newer technologies. That is going to be easily done by building in Chennai. Chennai gives us the base to build the foundation. We now have a centre of gravity which we didn't have before. Chennai facility will have the global footprint.
What do you think the role of IT wing of AstraZeneca in the overall business in future?
A strategic partner! One thing we talk about is IT should get out of the way. In an unhealthy organisation, IT feels like its in the way because things don't work, and when IT is in the way, people go outside. We dont want to be in the way, we want to be out of the way. When you are out of the way, then you are like oxygen or electricity. You breath and you don't think about breathing, it just happens. And then you focus on what you are trying to do. We want to be like oxygen to AstraZeneca and then we can focus on the innovation. We have tremendous opportunity in intersection of technology in life sciences and medical and discovery, to really be working with the scientists and with sales people to get to the next level of great enablement. And that will come from being a proactive strategic partner, but again, they wont be thinking about it (aboug IT). In future, it will be like Oxygen. That is really the future for us.
Wearables are the new buzzword in healthcare sector. Are you looking at the opportunity?
Yes, we have a lot of device partners we work with and we have a digital marketing strategy where we are looking at patient services and other ways of collecting information and pushing information. Its early stage and lot of companies are thinking about it. Some of the regulatory rules are almost cleared and companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and many others are working on it and we are partners with many of these firms. We want to be partners in this. It is not our primary business. So we are trying to assess how it helps us and how it helps our patients and then figure out the right way to go ahead.
What is the role of IT in drug discovery?
The importance of IT in AstraZeneca is increasing as it is in many companies around the world. How we discover drugs is very dependent these days upon the virtualisation of medicines. It used to be that you would try molecules in an animal and then in a human, which takes long period of time, but now thanks to genomic sequencing and a lot of massive databases, using which we can virtualise and simulate how certain drugs will behave in the human body, which means we need to spend less time (we still need to test them properly) because we can eliminate problems before we get to that stage, focus only the most viable drugs on the clinical trial process. In manufacturing, it will increase the ability to reduce our cost and cycle time of manufacturing products and increase the quality. In the sales process where technology helps massively because technology like iPads and mobile devices are enabling our sales people to make sure that the time they have spend with the doctors is used in a meaningful way.
Increasingly we are connecting with patients also where we can tell how effective the drugs are and in trial we can collect the efficacy details. It can cut down the time and cost spend on developing a new drug.
It is also helpful in identifying a molecule for development. The future really is combining the small molecule with the large molecule, the biologics. Combining those two multiplies the complexity and it is important that we merge the databases from these two different research and discovery processes into one. Thats where the IT helps. It has to access data from different sources including from academia and from different departments within AstraZeneca. However, the exponential growth is also increasing the challenge of finding the real valuable data and bringing it to the person who is trying to make the decision. It is the same with AstraZeneca and life sciences - big IT challenge.