Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. I want to start with a question for each of you. Given the current pressure in the industry, how can we improve efficiency and address the decline in R&D productivity?
The C-suite is focusing on these issues. We're seeing intense pressure and major reorganizations in the industry. How can the people in this audience contribute to solving these problems? Instead of just handling day-to-day tasks and being reactive, how can they be part of executive discussions and bring solutions to the problems executives face when making future decisions? I'll start with Mark for a biopharma perspective, and then we'll hear from Mitch on the commercial leadership side.
Mark Currie, Ph.D., Iaso Venture Partner & CSO, Wild Bio
I love being first. When I think about how R&D interacts with finance, procurement, and legal, I prefer both sides to see themselves as partners. It's crucial to embed these departments into the R&D process.
In our organization, we start building the yearly budget in September and finalize it in January. There are many interactions during this time. Our R&D dreams are big, and they come with big price tags. So, integrating finance, procurement, and legal into the team is crucial. We need to work as partners to develop a budget and processes that lead to a productive R&D organization. There are negotiations along the way, and while we start big, we often scale down as reality sets in. However, the goal remains clear: bringing forward drugs that help patients.
In R&D, time is critical. We need to reduce the time it takes to conduct high-quality research and development. We can't afford to wait a year because our competition will outpace us. We have to be laser beam-focused, and every day counts. Therefore, we must ensure our processes are highly efficient and synchronized with our partners. If we wait, experiments aren’t done, data isn’t analyzed, and decisions aren’t made.
So, I encourage everyone to work as partners, not separate entities.
Mitch Coyne, Chief Commercial Officer, BioIVT
That was fantastic. I don't know if I can match that answer, but when I think about it, as a supplier, my history is in lab consumables and equipment, and now I'm on the biological side.
When I joined BioIVT and looked at the market differently because we deal with human tissue and fluids, I realized that our approach didn't need to change much. We need to understand customer requirements and meet their needs. Whether they prefer traditional channels or online marketplaces, we must make their buying experience as frictionless as possible.
If they want to buy through an online marketplace, we want to make it as seamless as possible for the customer. When we think about that, it's an evolving space, right? And we have an innovative solution, and we're selling or providing, you know, human biological samples and fluids. There are different things that come with it. There's the quality of the sample, there's a lot of information, there are certificates, there's documentation that you need to have, there's a quality of the samples that you're getting. So it's a little bit of a different experience than just, you know, a lab, a general lab supply, right? So in that regard, you know, we have to think differently. We have to be innovative in our approach and look at what's essential to our customers to make it as frictionless as possible and how they want to procure.
Our primary goal is to help you accelerate science for the betterment of the communities around you. As Mark mentioned, you have new goals and objectives each year. We need to understand what's changing in your environments so we can best align our offerings to meet your needs.
Time is the enemy of all of us. It's the time and quality of what we're providing and getting to you most efficiently. Bill and I like to use the expression frictionless. It has to be as frictionless as possible so we're not wasting your time and you're not coming back with questions about quality or document correction.
We have to be really, really efficient at what we do, which is delivering products to scientists who are making a difference in the world.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
That’s a great introduction. Just before I came in, I was chatting with some of the audience members, and we discussed how there can be a disconnect between the strategies executives develop and what gets pushed down to those who execute these strategies. This disconnect tends to be more pronounced in larger organizations.
My question for you is, how do you align key performance indicators (KPIs) within the organization? Specifically, if your goal is to improve R&D productivity or other metrics related to return on investment within a specific time period, how does that translate to what R&D procurement measures? Can these be measured transactionally, and how can executives drive broader goals into the performance metrics used to measure individual performance?
Mark Currie, Ph.D., Iaso Venture Partner & CSO, Wild Bio
Each year, we develop a one-year plan, a three-year plan, and a five-year plan. Our metrics are very clear as we consider growing our organization, expanding therapeutic areas, and serving patients. We set specific goals to identify the data we need and the answers we seek.
It might be a discovery program that is moving to a development candidate, which will then move to an IND molecule, which will go into phase one inpatient, or a normal volunteer, which will then go into clinical development. But we have a very clear marked-out progression.
Along the way, we must have clear data supporting our sourcing opportunities and the contract research organizations we engage in for multivariate analysis. We need well-defined partnerships that show us how quickly projects can start, how soon we can see progress, and how we can effectively monitor that progress.
We can't afford to be nine months into a year-long experiment only to discover we haven't made any progress. We now have more automation to provide leaders in various R&D organizations with real-time feedback on progress. This allows R&D to adapt quickly, make data-driven changes to our objectives, and decide whether to continue or stop a project based on the data.
R&D is all about picking winners and quickly eliminating losers. Getting information earlier is crucial for us. We need to know where we are, where the data from our vendors is coming from, and how quickly we're getting it. We also need to track our progress against the budget. When data shows that a project isn't viable, we must make changes promptly, not wait for the yearly forecast. Similarly, if a project shows great promise, we must accelerate it based on the data.
This is where we want our partners to be very actively involved on the procurement side. Being proactive, understanding the decisions we face, and anticipating upcoming needs are crucial. Often, the decision is clear-cut: either we proceed with a project, or we don't. If we decide to move forward and accelerate, we need to know what resources we can access quickly to support the project.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
Great. Thanks. Let's talk about technology because there have been dramatic changes in how R&D procurement interacts with the external world. The innovation in this space is particularly interesting on the supplier side because suppliers can see everything that everyone is doing. They know which companies use specific methods, which still rely on manual processes, and which have adopted new technologies.
Bill, I'd like to ask you two questions. First, what is your technology strategy as a key supplier? Second, what exciting trends are you seeing from your customers in terms of different ways to meet their business needs?
Bill Pierce, Chief Information Officer, BioIVT
You think information technology (IT) has gone through phases at the highest level, right? If we go back to the 1990s, technology was designed statically and hierarchically.
In the past, with systems like Oracle ERP or SAP ERP, there was only one way to do things in finance or IT, which was often forced on everyone. The good news is those days are long gone. We've now entered the fifth wave of technology, which is all about composability. And why is composability so important?
We talked about partnering, right? IT is a shared service, just like any other entity within an organization. So, my strategy focuses on sales enablement and efficiency. This includes making quoting, interactions, and quarterly business reviews as efficient as possible.
So, we have to consider the personas and the people involved in that workflow and devise very composable, rapid, and efficient ways of doing that. It's not a six-month project; it's a waterfall. It's very agile and very adaptive. So you can kind of wrap technology as it exists and improve it over time.
I have a four-pillar platform roadmap for BioIVT. Some of it is scientific, some is operational, and some is commercial. I just think about how I can enable my business partners internally to enable the personas of everybody in this room externally. As Mitch said, how do I take your friction away?
If you're having a hard time sorting through inventory and we're giving you answers back that just don't make sense, if you're not sure we're compliant, or if you're not sure what the price is, I can't imagine going through the grocery store and not knowing the price of what I'm buying. I would walk out of that grocery store.
Everything that we're trying to do is move to more of the platform experience. Think about Amazon or Google. How do you have that platform experience where the analytics and the data are just there? Returning to your KPI question, as we think about the KPIs, the system and the workflow can produce the data to decide whether you comply with your KPIs.
If we don't know the KPIs, we can't produce it. So, my biggest advice is to come to your IT team as a partner and say here are the KPIs; here's what matters to us from a strategic perspective and then force the IT team to come back to you with a roadmap and a plan to get there.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
Do you also want to comment on what you’ve seen across the industry as a supplier?
Bill Pierce, Chief Information Officer, BioIVT
Yes, sure. I’ll use BioIVT as an example.
BioIVT has had many siloed businesses, and it’s very transaction-focused; a customer comes to our site, selects ADME, goes to normal human and animal or to another line of business, completes a transaction, and is done. And now we're moving away from that and towards being more experiential and strategic for our customers.
Back to enabling the science—How do we enable the outcomes? We know we're just part of this extensive continuum of having a clinical outcome. How do we drive that speed? How do we drive that quality and reduce that friction?
Everything that we're doing is to think about our partners like Science Exchange and say, How do we enable and how do we integrate, and how do we very simply become that one-stop shop for you, even though we're abstracting two, two separate companies, right, and trying to make that as simple as humanly possible for the workflow, right, for the personas, so that when you're trying to find your PO, you're trying to find it, pay with your credit card, you want to see that old search you did so you can reorder. All those things become very easy for you so that you're not doing what you had to do before, where you, as I said, build an email and wait two days for him to respond.
So, I think we expect to see more rapid integration and an integrated composable experience, and we plan to move away from ad hoc, transactional experiences.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
We have about 10 minutes left, and I wanted to ask if the audience had questions because it's really interesting to hear from people doing these jobs.
For example, how can you better align with executives and what they're trying to achieve? Sometimes, we hear things like, “That sounds great, but my job is still measured on this metric, which is not exactly the same.” And sometimes, we have things pushed on us, like, “Hey, you've got to save 10 percent of this budget overnight.”
Sometimes, we wonder, “How can that be aligned with this long-term strategy?” So, I'd love to ask the audience if they have any questions that people might have about their perspective on how you can align with executives in your organization to achieve their goals.
Audience Question 1
Once you have a good plan and have partnered with research, have you found challenges with legal partners regarding the contracting process? And if so, what was your approach? Was it something that worked better to optimize the partnership there, too?
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
That's a great question. How can you partner with legal? Getting legal on the same page and being agile is one of the challenges that procurement faces.
Let’s get both sides' perspectives since you probably have the same challenges as a supplier. Your legal team sometimes blocks progress. So, how can you align with them to balance risk with the agility of the business?
Mark Currie, Ph.D., Iaso Venture Partner & CSO, Wild Bio
I think it's pretty simple. I don't think you want silos in any organization. You want organizations that have very clearly defined top-level goals. In biotech or biopharma, the primary goal always comes back to the fact that we're there to bring forward drugs that will improve patients' lives.
It’s a pretty simple goal, but then there are a lot of very detailed goals as we go forward. My preference has always been—and I've been doing this for 30 years—to have one of the people we would work with face-to-face on the legal side sit with our team throughout the year.
We would meet monthly with the legal person involved—and that's not the IP attorney. The IP attorney is with us throughout the year. They're so critical to us and our inventions, so they would typically sit-in at a weekly meeting. For me, it's all about both sides understanding what they bring to the table and how we're all trying to work together to meet our goals.
Having access to legal outside of those meetings is essential. Being able to walk down the hall and not have to have an appointment and be able to sit with the person and say, I've got this challenge right now. We've got this contract that's not going through. We need to get this resolved and get it resolved as a team effort.
When I hear there's a legal slowdown on our contract, it's often our own legal. So it's like, let's get this resolved, right? Let's finish this sooner rather than later because the experiments are waiting.
The human respect that both sides bring, along with apparent talent, skill, and backgrounds, can make this work. It's not just about the science but the overall organization working effectively.
Mitch Coyne, Chief Commercial Officer, BioIVT
When I think about supplier contracts and legal issues, the further you are from the customer and understand their needs, the harder everything becomes. As an organization, if we can clearly define what's important for the terms we're willing to negotiate and have strong framing, we can move faster with our commercial team and discussions with the customer.
Involving too much legal can slow things down, but it starts with understanding the business goals and structuring the terms accordingly. We need to know what we can deliver and negotiate those terms upfront without getting bogged down by legal details.
Additionally, we need to ensure that our operations and business processes can execute the contract flawlessly. After signing, we need a mechanism to manage the contract effectively. The legal document is just a fallback; the real focus should be executing the contract's business rationale. If we understand and frame the arrangement well, we can get through the legal process faster, regardless of whose contract we use. It's all about understanding the business terms and ensuring we can operate within the agreement.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
To me, contracting is often very reactionary, and you will always be on the back foot if it is an immediate need. Because now you've got R& D breathing down your neck, telling you, Hey, we've got to get this contract through. That puts you in a weaker negotiating position. Many of the marketplaces that have evolved have been designed to be precisely the opposite of that, which is really about strategic contracting, having all of the suppliers you will be working with already contracted and available.
If you need to change suppliers, there's no downside. There's no time delay associated with getting that other supplier on board because they are already available through that standard contract.
Bill Pierce, Chief Information Officer, BioIVT
In the cybersecurity world, I know you probably want to plug your ears when I say that, right? It's very similar to legal—everyone hates it. People often think we're just getting in their way. But in reality, we're focused on assessing the organization's risk.
If you've ever experienced a breach, you understand. Attorneys are trying to do the same thing. I try to meet them on their level. For GDPR, I had to educate our attorney because she didn’t know the technology. I explained everything we were doing for cybersecurity and data loss prevention. The language she wanted to include in the contract added no value because we had already addressed those issues. They couldn't even implement what she was writing.
So, I had to get her up to speed. I sent my cybersecurity expert to work with the legal and compliance teams for two weeks. I told them to lock themselves in a room and learn how to talk to each other.
Mitch Coyne, Chief Commercial Officer, BioIVT
I will add that not every sales rep or account manager is well-versed in contract management. It's important to escalate the issue or ensure the person you engage with has the necessary experience.
Don't assume your transactional rep will be skilled in contract management. They might become paralyzed, causing unnecessary delays and involvement from others. Ensure you're talking to the right people who can execute as needed.
Again, it's frictionless. We want to put the right people in the right place at the right time, with the right technology, to enable your science to advance faster in all facets.
Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange
Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for today. I want to thank our panelists for their time and all of you for attending. Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions or wish to discuss any of these topics. Have a great evening.