WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Pharma is not a field I know much about. Yet I find it interesting how digital may help transforms the drug development process. This new Pharma tool - InfoDesk - appears to be merely the digitization of pen-n-paper collaboration processes. An improvement but not a revolution.

It brings back memories of Wired magazine Sergey brin's search for Parkinson's cure where a true digital transformation is proposed. Instead of formulating a theory, then painstakingly verifying its results in year long tests, Brin proposes the analysis of very large patient datasets to "look for patterns" which may suggest good investigation paths. And possibly transform the way drug research is done... as well as providing results much faster. That's what I call digital transformation of the medical/pharma world! From Wired:

"Brin is after a different kind of science altogether. Most Parkinson’s research, like much of medical research, relies on the classic scientific method: hypothesis, analysis, peer review, publication. Brin proposes a different approach, one driven by computational muscle and staggeringly large data sets. It’s a method that draws on his algorithmic sensibility—and Google’s storied faith in computing power—with the aim of accelerating the pace and increasing the potential of scientific research. “Generally the pace of medical research is glacial compared to what I’m used to in the Internet,” Brin says. “We could be looking lots of places and collecting lots of information. And if we see a pattern, that could lead somewhere.”

In other words, Brin is proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesize, and then find the patterns that lead to answers. And he has the money and the algorithms to do it."