Tightening FDA approval standards are pushing Life Sciences firms to make even further investments in technologies that support secure document sharing with multiple parties. At Firmex, our life sciences clients continue to open more data rooms and use more bandwidth and storage than any other industry segment.
The Life Sciences industry includes organizations involved in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices and clinical research, all companies with highly capital intensive development pipelines. To be successful, these firms must fill their pipelines with a steady stream of potential products from a range of R&D efforts, knowing that only a few will become commercial successes.
We asked our Life Sciences clients to explain why they are such active users of data rooms, and here is what they told us:
1) Tightening FDA approval standards – With the aim of identifying drugs that have the potential for harsh side effects, regulators are asking firms to provide more safety data on pharmaceuticals, especially on drugs with broad indications like oncology or diabetes. More extensive information requests from the FDA is putting pressure on firms to submit their first filings for new drugs with exhaustive research. The result is more documentation, shared with more firms and individual experts. This documentation is being shared online through data rooms to help streamline the process.
2) Cost-cutting in big pharma and now big biotech – For many years big pharma has been streamlining towards more specialized pipelines and leaner sales forces; now big biotech firms are making similar budget-cutting moves. Firms want the efficiency of using data rooms, but need cost certainty to fit neatly within their budgets. This is a key reason why the Firmex model of upfront pricing for an unlimited number of data rooms and users is very attractive to Life Sciences companies.
3) Acquisitions by big biotech to maintain pipeline – This is always a theme among biotech, but is especially the case for big pharma firms in 2011 that have an abundance of cash and are facing impending patent cliffs. Typical acquisition targets include smaller firms within popular therapeutic areas like cancer and infectious diseases. In their due diligence, companies are being even more thorough in an effort to improve their chances in acquiring a commercially viable piece of intellectual property that will pass FDA approvals.
In our conversations with study start-up managers to clinical operations directors, it’s clear they prefer Firmex for their data room use. Life Sciences firms choose to work with us because of our high security standards, and the cost certainty we offer through our upfront pricing for unlimited services. Best of all, we don’t charge per page or data room like many other virtual data room providers. And it’s our pleasure to be of help of those who are working to improve humandkind’s quality of life.
