Pipeline is Aspen Biosciences premiere application for managing drug discovery projects. It started as a simple dashboard for visualising the drug discovery pipeline, and has grown into what some project scientists characterise as “JIRA for Pharmaceutical Projects”. That growth has been driven largely by conversations with scientists who’ve found themselves in the position of having to manage drug discovery projects and needing a tool that was both lightweight and user-friendly.
In the previous series of blog posts, we talked about Design Thinking and how it can be used to create research-oriented software to support drug discovery. In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a look at some of the stories that scientists shared with us, and show you how we translated those stories into new functionality for Pipeline.
No More Gantt Charts
Not too long ago, Dimitri (Aspen’s Chief of Business Development) and I were in the Bay Area to talk to a customer about a project that they had in mind. The company had just had a successful IPO, based in large part on the strength of their lead candidates in the area of fibrosis and cancer. They had moved into new facilities and were executing on their plan to bring a drug into clinical trials.
We sat down with their CIO to learn more about their project. During the course of the conversation though, we learned that they actually had another project in mind for us.
“I’m curious about your Pipeline product,” he said.
“The genesis for the product came as a result of a project we were working on for the site head of a local pharmaceutical company. She had two spreadsheets that the company used to manage drug discovery & development projects, and she wanted a way to combine the project data and visualise the results as single unified pipeline. Every quarter she would hold an All-Hands meeting, and she needed a means of visually communicating the progress the site was making, and recognising the contributions of local colleagues.”
“Since then we’ve completely re-implemented the project using Google’s real-time database known as Firebase. We’ve added target information from sources like EntrezGene, PubMed, UniProt, and the Protein Data Bank. It’s built from the ground up to support mobile, tablets and desktop because we realise that project managers are constantly moving and we need to meet them where they are.”
We did a quick demo for him and started to dig in deeper into their specific needs. “During a meeting with some of the company directors,” he began, ”they were looking for a way of showing project progress. They wanted to know the status of projects and to be able to track tasks. We have a staff of project managers who are using Microsoft Project and the problem is that it’s difficult for them to update. They have to get status update information for each of the tasks and then update the project. So there’s a lot of walking around involved.”
“We want a more participatory approach to project tracking. An approach that lets our scientists track their tasks, and notify their colleagues when a task is complete. This should make it easier for project managers to have a real-time view for the current status of their projects. This frees them up to focus on tasks like managing risks and issues, and planning sprints.”
“But what the directors are really after is a way of seeing when a project’s in trouble, and when it needs help, and they can’t do it from Gantt charts. In fact, one of them said to me, ‘don’t show me another Gantt chart. Just tell me if there’s a problem and what needs to be done to fix it.’”
The Pipeline view is the main entry point designed to meet the needs of the directors you were talking about. It shows them at a glance each of the current projects that you’re working on and where they are in your pipeline. Each project is represented by a single tile that contains the name of the project, the therapeutic class (small molecule, antibody, antisense, CAR-T, etc), and the status of the project (indicated by a green, yellow or red bar). The color of the tile indicates the therapeutic area for the project. When you hover over the project, a brief description appears.
All of the settings, like therapeutic areas, therapeutic classes and indications, (including the icons and colors) are completely customisable. Although Pipeline ships with a standard drug discovery workflow, even that is customisable. So if the focus of your company is cell-based therapeutics, you can change the workflow to meet your needs.
Click on the project to see more detail. So if you want to find out why a particular project is yellow, you can view the project Status Description field to find a more complete answer to your question.
To help spread the workload, Pipeline includes task management tools that make it easy for scientists and project managers to track progress on their tasks. Users can log work against tasks. As tasks are completed, notifications appear in the Activity Feed. Common task sets can be created and used to initialise your project plan with a minimum amount of work.
A task view helps the bench scientist understand what’s on their plate and helps answer common questions like “what do I need to accomplish this week”. Pipeline has both a cross-cutting view that shows the user all tasks assigned to them across all projects, and a project specific view, that shows all tasks for a given project.
Read more of the Pipeline Stories series.
Need Help Getting Started?
To help you quickly transition to Pipeline, we also provide an on-boarding service to get your projects, targets, documents and tasks into Pipeline and to train your staff. To find out more about Pipeline, and what we can do for your research organisation, contact us.