Three principles to tame complexity in drug discovery. DrugOps emphasizes Shared Ownership, Workflow Automation, and Rapid Feedback.
This article is Part 1 in a 5 part series on the fundamentals of DrugOps. In case you'd like to jump directly any of the other sections please find the links below:
Complexity abounds in modern drug discovery. Teams routinely use multiple discovery platforms, engineer multiple therapeutic formats, perform increasingly sophisticated analyses using increasingly sensitive instruments, and generate ever-growing and ever-more complex datasets. Software tools in turn have sprung up to address each new development, promising to handle your sample management, molecular registration, repertoire sequence analysis, or report generation problems. Underlying the development of those tools is a premise: we can solve this particular problem, but if you’re trying to manage the entire drug discovery process, you're on your own.
Modern software development has also grown in scale and complexity. The ubiquity of browser-equipped computers has made us all as consumers of software expect that our applications will be available, reliable, and performant at all times and from all devices. The challenges involved in delivering modern software systems required a fundamental change in how software development and IT operations teams function. DevOps, a philosophy emphasizing greater collaboration between the development and operations teams, has emerged as a new paradigm for teams developing scalable, reliable, and performant applications.
DevOps requires that teams share ownership of their systems and goals, automate as much of their workflow as possible to achieve consistency and efficiency, and iterate rapidly on the feedback they receive at every step in their process. At StackWave, we believe there is an analogous approach for modern drug discovery - an approach emphasizing shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback. To emphasize these shared characteristics, we've termed this approach DrugOps.
What is DrugOps? Like DevOps, DrugOps emphasizes shared ownership between the scientific and operations teams; workflow automation to improve consistency, reliability, and efficiency; and rapid feedback to ensure that the company continues to move in the right direction.
Shared Ownership
Everyone knows what the goals are, and everyone is responsible for ensuring those goals are achieved. The protein expression team is responsible for maintaining the expression systems and protocols to produce high-quality reagents - but they're also looking for risks that could affect product purity or hinder successful manufacturing at scale. The discovery team generates the initial set of leads - but they also collaborate with downstream teams to improve their methods of generating and engineering high-quality leads. The operations team ensures that physical and financial resources are in place for every team - but they also forecast potential risks to projects from low inventory or cost overruns to help every team plan ahead and make difficult decisions with data.
Workflow Automation
Every team develops their own processes, but the processes involved in developing a new therapeutic product are as complex as the science underpinning them. Manually performing these steps can lead to errors and inconsistencies; the more tedious the process, the greater the risk. Automating these processes can make them more consistent and more reliable, and the teams involved more efficient. Part of the time gained by automating processes can be invested into thinking about and improving those processes, improvements that can then be manifested back into the automation.
Rapid Feedback
Sharing ownership of the company's goals and automating repetitive processes are key to effectively moving drug discovery and development forward, but in the absence of clear metrics on whether those goals are attainable and those processes are working, the team will move rapidly towards the wrong outcomes. All of the data gathered and generated needs to be actionable so that everyone can see how the organization is performing against its goals and react when things aren't going as planned.
We also built our Affinity platform for antibody discovery with these goals in mind. Click here to learn more about the Affinity platform. In the meantime, we welcome your thoughts on the approach we've outlined. Have you experienced issues that DrugOps could have addressed? Are there particular aspects of this approach you want to hear more about? Please email us and let us know.
If you'd like to read on, please check out Part 2 in the DrugOps series: Shared Ownership.
Rapid Feedback in antibody drug discovery can quickly identify issues in format, development, manufacturing, and discovery approaches and processes
ADCs are essentially a new class of drugs that combine the targeting properties of antibodies with the cell-killing ability of drugs.
Fully-automated antibody lead identification example of Workflow Automation to save scientists’ time on redundant and error-prone steps.