The life sciences environment is more competitive and complex than it has ever been. Shrinking market exclusivity, decreased R&D productivity, price pressures, patent expiry, competition from generics, and sales and marketing inefficiencies are causing life sciences giants to rethink the rules of the game. The companies that attain success will be those that manage the process from drug discovery through to marketing with optimal efficiency, speedy decision-making and customer focus.

Today, bringing a new drug to market can cost upwards of $900 million and take 10-15 years. But new technological advances in research and development are propelling discoveries in the life sciences arena and making the overall mechanism more efficient and effective. This efficiency, however, has resulted in the creation and accumulation of unprecedented amounts of data, structured and unstructured - ranging from annotated databases of disease profiles and molecular pathways and sequences, to structure-activity relationships, chemical structures of combinatorial libraries of compounds, individual and population.