SaaS Business Intelligence - It Just Makes Sense

I spoke recently to the commercial leaders of a well-established pharma company who were relaying their frustrations with their current data and business intelligence environment. The complaints were ones I hear frequently – “it’s slow and inflexible,” “it doesn’t contain all of our data and we have quality issues,” “it’s inflexible, complex and expensive to maintain,” “the analytics are not relevant to the changing business.” This particular Sales Operations group was considering options for enhancing their analytic capabilities and was considering “rebuilding” portions of the company’s enterprise data warehouse to meet their needs. This was an undertaking that was projected to take almost two years to complete and would result in internal demand on technical and business resources that simply wasn’t there. In the meantime the organization would be stuck in the equivalent of the Dark Ages when it came to sales and customer analytics and intelligence. This didn’t make sense to those leaders who needed insights today, and it was difficult to rationalize business as usual when the current solution wasn’t meeting expectations.

When I asked if they had built their new CRM system from the ground up, the obvious answer was no. They had recently implemented a leading SaaS CRM solution that replaced a cumbersome in-house one and the same was true for their newly launched Closed Loop Marketing System. When I asked why they were only considering “building” their data and reporting system, their response was that they didn’t know other options existed.

There remains a deep-rooted belief in pharma that data and reporting systems need to be managed internally. It exists for a number of reasons, most of which don’t apply today.

• Security – data was once believed to be sacred; to expose it to third parties or internet accessible systems could lead to a corporate breach.
• Lack of solutions – SaaS-based business-focused commercially available data integration solutions have not been mainstream.
• Expertise – the thought that only IT and engineering teams could build and manage such complex solutions.
• Corporate hub – the idea that data could only exist in one place and serve the entire organization from the same physical system.

Security alone is not a reason to silo your data. Your organization is likely already hosting sensitive data outside of the four walls. If you deploy a SaaS-based CRM system such as Salesforce.com, your customer data is being managed in the cloud. Many HRS and ERP functions are internet-enabled and comply with the strictest data privacy laws. The security issue has largely been solved with SaaS solutions and is no longer a barrier to entry.

Traditional mainstream data and business intelligence solutions are big, cumbersome, and  difficult to maintain. Not only has there been a lack of pharma specific solutions, the ones that do exist require a monumental effort to design, customize and implement. Couple this with yearly upgrades, support teams, engineering and infrastructure, and you end up with a system that rarely meets Sales and Marketing needs. Better solutions exist today that are nimble and adaptive, pharma-centric, cost-effective and deliver more value than legacy systems. If the benefits of SaaS are appropriate for your CRM, the same is true for your commercial analytics solution.

Additionally, the SaaS era has brought with it the need for less IT expertise in your organization. All application and software upgrades and improvements are managed by the vendor, further reducing the burden on internal IT teams, and lessening the reliance on the engineering of the solution.  Complexity is removed with the productization of complex activities once thought only IT could handle. SaaS solutions remove the technology and engineering barrier and put the focus on the business and the opportunities the solution can provide. Pharma is in the business of developing and commercializing products that improve the health and wellbeing of their patients – not developing software.

While I’m a proponent of SaaS BI solutions, I’m not advocating against enterprise data warehouses (EDW); there is a time and a place for them. But I’ve seen the corporate chokehold of data cripple commercial teams in some of the most sophisticated organizations. Sales and marketing by virtue is a nimble and responsive organization that operates in real-time, competitive markets. Data and insights are the lifeblood of 

1) Decision making, 

2) Calling tactics and strategy, 

3) Understanding your customer and 

4) Determining performance cause and effect. 

Commercial teams require analytic solutions that can keep up and deliver real value through contextual and timely insight. The corporate EDW is rarely designed with these values in mind and hence rarely meets expectations.

The good news is that organizations are no longer bound to slow-moving legacy solutions that do not adapt to the ever-changing life sciences business. SaaS technology has brought remarkable improvements in the speed and agility in which pharma can process data and deliver insights. For an industry in need of flexible, intuitive, cost-effective BI solutions, it just makes sense.

Lots of Exercise May Boost Kids' Grades

Lots of Exercise May Boost Kids' Grades

A Dutch review of prior research reveals that the more physically active school-aged children are, the better they fare in the classroom.

Most of the studies in the review had been conducted in the United States, while one came out of Canada and the other out of South Africa.

The findings are published in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

"We found strong evidence of a significant positive relationship between physical activity and academic performance," the researchers, led by Amika Singh of the Vrije Universiteit University Medical Center at the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, said in a journal news release.

"The findings of one high-quality intervention study and one high-quality observational study suggest that being more physically active is positively related to improved academic performance in children," the authors noted.

Fourteen studies were analyzed; they ranged in size from about 50 participants to as many as 12,000 and involved children between the ages of 6 and 18.

The investigators noted that increases in blood and oxygen flow to the brain that accompanies exercise may play a role in improving classroom performance. The suggestion is that the dynamic prompts an increase in levels of hormones responsible for curtailing stress and boosting mood, while at the same time prompting the establishment of new nerve cells and synapse flexibility.

The Dutch team cautioned, however, that more rigorous work is needed to confirm the connection.

"Relatively few studies of high methodological quality have explored the relationship between physical activity and academic performance," they acknowledged. "More high-quality studies are needed on the dose-response relationship between physical activity and academic performance and on the explanatory mechanisms, using reliable and valid measurement instruments to assess this relationship accurately."

How to design drugs that could target particular nerve cells?

How to design drugs that could target particular nerve cells?

The future of drug design lies in developing therapies that can target specific cellular processes without causing adverse reactions in other areas of the nervous system. Scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Liège in Belgium have discovered how to design drugs to target specific areas of the brain. The research, led by Professor Neil Marrion at Bristol's School of Physiology and Pharmacology and published in this week's Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), will enable the design of more effective drug compounds to enhance nerve activity in specific nerves.

The team has been working on a subtype of ion channel called SK channels. Ion channels are proteins that act as pores in a cell membrane and help control the excitability of nerves.

Rather like an electrical circuit, ion channels work by allowing the flow of 'charged' potassium, sodium and calcium ions to enter or exit cell membranes through a network of pores formed by the channels, a subtype of which is the SK channel family.

The researchers have been using a natural toxin found in bee venom, called apamin, known for its ability to block different types of SK channel. SK channels enable a flow of potassium ions in and out of nerve cells that controls activity. The researchers have taken advantage of apamin being able to block one subtype of SK channel better than the others, to identify how three subtype SK channels [SK1-3] can be selectively blocked.

Neil Marrion, Professor of Neuroscience at the University, said: "The problem with developing drugs to target cellular processes has been that many cell types distributed throughout the body might all have the same ion channels. SK channels are also distributed throughout the brain, but it is becoming obvious that these channels might be made of more than one type of SK channel subunit. It is likely that different nerves have SK channels made from different subunits. This would mean that developing a drug to block a channel made of only one SK channel protein will not be therapeutically useful, but knowing that the channels are comprised of multiple SK subunits will be the key."

The study's findings have identified how SK channels are blocked by apamin and other ligands. Importantly, it shows how channels are folded to allow a drug to bind. This will enable drugs to be designed to block those SK channels that are made of more than one type of SK channel subunit, to target the symptoms of dementia and depression more effectively.

Vincent Seutin, one co-author of the paper, said: "Our study also shows a difference in the way apamin and nonpeptidic (potentially a useful drug) ligands interact with the channel. This may have important implications in terms of drug design."

Visualization of DNA Synthesis in Vivo

Visualization of DNA Synthesis in Vivo

Interactions of biological macromolecules are the central bases of living systems. Biological macromolecules are synthesized in living cells by linking many small molecules together. Naturally occurring macromolecules include genetic materials (DNA) and proteins. A detailed understanding of the synthesis of these macromolecules in whole animals is a basic requirement for understanding biological systems, and for the development of new therapeutic strategies.

To visualize the synthesis of biomolecules in living organisms, artificial small molecules can be added to and incorporated by the cell's own biosynthetic machinery. Subsequently, the modified biomolecules containing the artificial units can be selectively labelled with fluorescent substances. Until now, this approach had one major limitation: the substances used for labelling were toxic and caused cell death.

Anne Neef, a PhD student from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, has developed a new substance that can replace the natural nucleoside thymidine in DNA biosynthesis. This fluorinated nucleoside called "F-ara-Edu" labels DNA with little or no impact on genome function in living cells and even whole animals. "F-ara-Edu" is less toxic than previously reported compounds used for DNA labelling and it can be detected with greater sensitivity. "F-ara-Edu" is therefore ideally suited for experiments aimed at "birth dating" DNA synthesis in vivo. "As a demonstration of this, F-ara-Edu was injected into Zebrafish eggs immediately after fertilization. 


Following development and hatching of the fish, the very first cells undergoing differentiation in embryonic development could be identified", explains Anne's research advisor, Prof. Nathan Luedtke. "By visualizing new DNA synthesis in whole animals, the sites of virus infection and cancerous growth can be identified due to the abundance of DNA replication in these tissues", adds Prof. Luedtke. This approach should therefore lead to new strategies in drug development.