To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
Assay Depot
Headquarters
San Diego, Calif.
Years in Drug Research
2 Years
Spokesperson
Kevin Lustig, PhD, CEO and President
Web site
About the company
Assay Depot recently launched the world’s first full service outsourcing marketplace for pharmaceutical research services, located online at assaydepot.com. The marketplace brings together many service providers onto one website and makes it easy for research scientists to find and order the services they need. Drug researchers can compare detailed service descriptions, view customer reviews, request quotes, place orders, track service progress and retrieve their data reports from a single secure location. Assay Depot plans to eventually offer all of the services needed to run a drug discovery program from inception to clinical trial.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Ten years ago, the pharmaceutical industry only outsourced a small percentage of their drug discovery research. At that time there were only a handful of companies offering outsourced drug discovery services. Today the situation is dramatically different. Over the past ten years, thousands of service companies have been formed to accommodate an enormous increase in pharmaceutical outsourcing. This has created an urgent need for new ways for research scientists to find and evaluate outsourced research services.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
The main challenge we foresee over the next 10 years is convincing drug researchers to change the way they think about the drug discovery process. Pharmaceutical scientists have long clung to a bias against anything “not invented here”, and as a consequence most steps in the drug discovery process have traditionally been carried out within the pharmaceutical company’s own laboratories. This attitude needs to change as we move to a more flexible and efficient research model in which pharmaceutical scientists access many of the services they need from external service providers.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
Two key factors have driven the development of our core technologies. First, there are now thousands of service companies that need help finding customers. Second, there are now tens of thousands of drug researchers that need help finding service companies. By bringing together many companies as part of a single online marketplace, and creating a one-stop shop for drug services, Assay Depot makes it possible for new service businesses to reach a wide audience of potential customers, and for researchers to find and evaluate the service providers they need.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
We are nearing the end of the era of the fully integrated pharmaceutical company (FIPCO), and are entering the era of the virtual drug discovery company. The most successful drug discovery organizations of the future will be those that maintain core expertise in a few select areas while outsourcing most of their research activities. Within 10 years, it will be possible to run an entire drug discovery program from a single laptop computer. All of the drug discovery services needed to go from concept to clinic will be accessible without building any laboratory infrastructure whatsoever.
