Memo to software vendors: Biotech wants smart pitches

Various other factors also come into play when those in charge of technology at biotech companies try to figure out if they're getting their money's worth. Different groups of people within such companies have different needs and those needs may change often, and that's a particular challenge when a company operates from multiple locations, said John Hill, executive director of drug discovery and exploratory informatics at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., with world headquarters in New York.

The technological innovation his company most needs in the next five years involves data and software integration, Hill said, "and how to make information available to the right people at the right time, in the right context."

Predictably, integration came up repeatedly as a major challenge and as an area needing attention in the near term.

Roberts added to that the need for informatics to help scientists better understand the genome. Now that they know what the genes are, they need to figure out what they do and how they work. Also important to pharmaceuticals is predictive toxicology, with good models developed that help companies figure out early in the process of discovering new drugs whether the drugs are dangerous for humans to use. Good predictive toxicology technologies would more than double the productivity of pharmaceutical companies, he said.

But perhaps the largest issue has little to do with technology, but with getting recalcitrant scientists excited about tools available to them. The key to that is to let the scientists be scientists and to not try to push them to be interested in topics that just don't wow them, various panelists suggested, perhaps to the chagrin of engineers in the audience who advocated for big pharma to hire some engineers for upper management to make decisions from that point of view. (Such advocacy came up elsewhere at the conference as well, indicating the historical friction between science and engineering and creating a stir among audience members and panelists alike.)

"Scientists don't ask questions like, 'Should this pull-down menu be next to that pull-down menu'," Murcko said. "Scientists don't care about those kinds of questions."