What is Digital Science?
“Digital Science” is a term used to describe a state where the physical operations of scientific innovation are planned and executed with a “digital mirror”, enabling operational excellence and observability in our decision-making. Digital science uses the totality of the data from laboratory operations — people, samples, inventory, results — to provide an environment where the scientists who perform physical work are augmented by the laboratory software they use all day, every day. Lastly, “digital science” in practice provides FAIR and ALCOA++ data as implicit functionality NOT at the expense of the user experience.
read moreWhy is establishing
a digital science infrastructure so important?
Within the pre-clinical realm, there are three ways to improve the production of clinical drug candidates. (1) Decrease Attrition before and in the clinic (2) Increase Throughput of viable candidates (3) Find entirely New Science to impact disease and make drug candidates.
AI will help us through improved target selection, improved molecular design and synthesis, activity and liability prediction and drug formulations. Most importantly, AI will help us ensure that each DMTA cycle is far more informative compared with today. This has a critical dependency on our digital lab infrastructure.
Automation can increase throughput of DMTA cycles and industrialize new “academic” science. All levels of lab automation require integration with the experimental designs and result data to be effective. This is the primary reason for the limited impact of lab automation today.
Our entire DMTA cycle requires a robust R&D informatics infrastructure - including AI and automation enabled improvements. Evidence of this can be seen in the few companies who are at the tip of the spear with “AI led drug development”. They have invested heavily in automation and they have built their own bespoke R&D informatics tools for executing their DMTA cycles. Why - because tools are not commercially available, go ask any of these companies.
DSDC: The story so far
After decades of frustration as a user and a vendor of R&D informatics, John Harman decoupled from all organizations to ensure there would be no ownership rights involved and in December 2023 the planning for a new product to solve life sciences R&D informatics challenges was started along with the idea to form the DSDC - an industry consortium to fund the development of a not-for-profit software product. As membership investment solicitation and grant funding continue, John is exploring other non-traditional mechanisms to fund the project. In parallel, definition and publication of key business and architectural designs continue with full transparency for open review. Stay tuned for more updates here…
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