Measuring the effectiveness and impact of an open innovation platform.

Today, most pharmaceutical companies complement their traditional R&D models with some variation on the Open Innovation (OI) approach in an effort to better access global scientific talent, ideas and hypotheses. Traditional performance indicators that measure economic returns from R&D through commercialization are often not applicable to the practical assessment of these OI approaches, particularly within the context of early drug discovery. This leaves OI programs focused on early R&D without a standard assessment framework from which to evaluate overall performance. This paper proposes a practical dashboard for such assessment, encompassing quantitative and qualitative elements, to enable decision-making and improvement of future performance. The use of this dashboard is illustrated using real-time data from the Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery (OIDD) program.

Open Innovation Drug Discovery (OIDD): a potential path to novel therapeutic chemical space.

The continued development of computational and synthetic methods has enabled the enumeration or preparation of a nearly endless universe of chemical structures. Nevertheless, the ability of this chemical universe to deliver small molecules that can both modulate biological targets and have drug-like physicochemical properties continues to be a topic of interest to the pharmaceutical industry and academic researchers alike. The chemical space described by public, commercial, in-house and virtual compound collections has been interrogated by multiple approaches including biochemical, cellular and virtual screening, diversity analysis, and in-silico profiling. However, current drugs and known chemical probes derived from these efforts are contained within a remarkably small volume of the predicted chemical space. Access to more diverse classes of chemical scaffolds that maintain the properties relevant for drug discovery is certainly needed to meet the increasing demands for pharmaceutical innovation. The Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery platform (OIDD) was designed to tackle barriers to innovation through the identification of novel molecules active in relevant disease biology models. In this article we will discuss several computational approaches towards describing novel, biologically active, drug-like chemical space and illustrate how the OIDD program may facilitate access to previously untapped molecules that may aid in the search for innovative pharmaceuticals.