As a boy growing up in a village on the outskirts of Vienna, this time of year always held a certain amount of excitement and trepidation for me. Every year on the evening of December 5th, after a feverish amount of shoe polishing, and sweeping of the front porch we would await the arrival of St Nick and Krampus (a sort of hairy, horned demon – don’t ask). St Nicholas would ask your parents, “were your children good this year”. If the answer was “Nein”, Krampus would hand your parents a switch to beat you with. If the answer was “Ja”, then you’d get a small gift from St Nick.
I was reminded of that tradition recently, as I watched a slew of articles from BioPharmaDive, Endpoints, FierceBio and Stat come across my desk documenting changes to pipelines, leadership teams, or clinical trial results. For the past few weeks, and in the run up to the JPM conference in mid-January, a lot of biotech companies will be polishing their slide decks in preparation for a series of meetings where they will be asked about their clinical trials, their pipelines and their strategies – not of course by St Nick, but by rooms of analysts, investors and potential partners. The answers to those questions will either result in either gifts (capital) or the investor equivalent of switches.
And although the preparation for JPM is intense, unlike Christmas, this isn’t a once-a-year activity. The process of scientific project & portfolio management (as opposed to financial portfolio management) is an almost continuous process as new programs are evaluated for inclusion in the pipeline, and existing programs are periodically re-evaluated.
Some of the most common events that trigger project and portfolio analytical reviews include:
Partnering Conference Preparation – preparing for conferences like JPM, BIO, Boston Biotech Week, Torrey Pines Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference, Biotech Showcase and LSX.
Scientific Conference Preparation – Preparing for major conferences such as AACR, ASCO and ASH – albeit with a different audience in mind.
Joint Governance Meetings – If the company is collaborating with other biotech or pharma companies then project readouts are performed at the end of each milestone.
Target/Project Assessment Meetings – throughout the course of the year, targets are constantly being assessed and projects are being re-evaluated in light of new evidence.
To reduce the amount of work involved in preparing for each of these types of activities, we’ve been working with our Early Access Partners to make improvements to our Pipeline Platform in two key areas:
- Target Management
- Project Planning
These tools are designed to help companies answer two questions: (1) What are we going to work on? (2) How are we going to pursue that work?
New Target Management Features
Let’s take a quick look at some of the new features of Target Management that you can expect to see.
Updated Target Management Cards – the new Target Management cards will make it easier for you to prioritise targets and filter by target, tag/keyword & target family.
Target Page Templates – since target families or target-indication pairs often make use of different databases (think DepMap for cancer targets or AICD for inflammation targets), we’ve made it easy to create custom fields and templates for targets.
Target Calculations – biotech companies often prioritise drug targets based on a variety of different tractability criteria, so we’ve integrated the Calculation Engine into Target Management to make this process easier for you. For example, you might have a calculation that determines if the target is better suited as an inhibitor target, a degrader target or an ADC target. You can also calculate the priorities of targets based on these properties, or any custom property that you add to the system.
Together these features make it possible to prioritise drug targets in your Pipeline using criteria that are unique to your company and its capabilities.
New Project Planning Features
In 2024, we launched the Planning module with support for Milestone planning, Target Product Profiles, Assay Plans and GRIDALL (Goals, Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions and Lessons Learned). As with most modules, we designed the Planning module to be template based. This minimises the amount of time that scientists need to spend planning a project, and ensures a consistent level of planning across projects.
This year we’ll be adding support for Assay Cascades and Target Candidate Profiles (TCPs). Similar to TPPs, TCPs allow scientists to define the pharmacological characteristics of the ideal molecule. These criteria constitute a “performance envelope” for a molecule. For example, for a second generation molecule, you might define a minimal set of criteria and an ideal set of criteria. As you screen these molecules, you can see how they perform against those criteria.
If you’d like to learn more about Pipeline, join us at the Why Summits Project & Portfolio Management conference in San Diego this January, or contact us at info@aspen.bio.