Knowing what your competitors are up to has never been more important. As Sean Ottewell reports, the latest addition to intelligence database technology aims to bring a new level of depth and refinement in the search for information on the opposition. One new package will fully integration of databases, analytical tools and alerting systems.
Keeping track of developments by competitors has always been important, but pharmaceutical intelligence databases became even more significant in the 1990s. They became the standard tools with which all aspects of drug development worldwide, from first patent to eventual launch or discontinuation, were tracked. The main difference in the 21st century is that those tools are going to become even more powerful.
Current Drugs, a leading supplier of intelligence databases, has given a very clear hint of the shape of things to come with the launch due later this year of IDdb3.
However, its third-generation database is not an updated version of the existing model. "It's a whole new product,“ noted sales and marketing vice president Jim Jacketti during a preview at the Online 99 exhibition in London last December.
Working closely with many of the world's top-50 pharmaceutical companies, Current Drugs has completely re-vamped the database to make it both more user-friendly and to offer numerous enhancements on the previous version.
New standards
IDdb3 provides a fully integrated suite of databases, analytical tools and alerting systems, all of which can be customised to the needs of scientists and business executives in pharmaceutical companies.
"It provides executives with an analysis of their competitors' research portfolio, profiling the most significant patent applications and assessing the probable impact of drugs in development. In addition, the database gives them access to detailed company financial reports, including an analysis of financial performance and sales forecasts,“ said managing director Ian Tarr (Fig. 1).
In addition, IDdb3 serves bench scientists and research managers by keeping them informed of new research in their areas of interest. As well a rolling scientific news service, the database features detailed reports from scientific meetings, competitive information extracted from patents, full coverage of the scientific literature, plus hyperlinks to the original research papers where they are available on the Internet.
Current Drugs hopes that by providing a fully-integrated service, its users will not need to trawl several databases to find information they need. It has also provided a layer of analysis on top of the underlying data and web-based interface to make everything accessible, even to novice users. IDdb3 is designed to be integrated easily with users' in-house systems, so they can build a proprietary knowledge base around the core system.
Among a number of innovations requested by users of earlier versions is Personal Alerts. These give the most important new information in IDdb3 via five standard pages: drugs, companies, meetings, patents and papers. All can be browsed and searched and every day the latest stories are carried on these pages while the most important article is highlighted at the top of the page.
The setting of alerts has been designed for simplicity. News in each category can be filtered by users so that only relevant information is displayed. Such preferences can be stored in an individual user's profile and, whenever IDdb3 is updated, alerts matching the profile can be e-mailed.
The alerts themselves are selected from key scientific journals, patents, meeting reports and premier newswires such as PR Newswire and Business Wire. These are enhanced with hyperlinks to related information in the database while commentary is added by Current Drugs' in-house scientific and business editors.
Another innovation is the Search Center. This replaces Search and SmartSearch and is divided into Guided Search and Advanced Search options. IDdb3 also has a quick search facility in the navigation bar called aFind this' where users can simply type in a term or drug name and click on a search icon. With Guided Search, new additions and updates can be traced, plus specific items such as a particular drug. Guided Searches can also be customised, for example to find drugs of interest to a particular research group within an organisation. Advanced searches allow various options to be selected, while also being able to combine with other searches which may have already been selected. Still more advanced searches are available with another new feature DrugNet.
DrugNet
To begin with, 14 complementary databases have been brought together to extend the basic information stored in IDdb3 on areas such as financial data and disease prevalence. One, Primark-Extel, offers detailed company financial analyses, including historical company accounts, image-based data, textual corporate profile and company news. The information here comes from annual reports and accounts, with changes being entered daily and updated weekly.
Also included on DrugNet is PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine's medical information service. With more than 10 million citations from Medline, Pre-Medline and related databases, PubMed combines extensive coverage of biomedical literature with rapid updating.
On top of this, PubMed also has links to related articles, full text papers and Genbank and other bioinformatic and genomic databases. This enhanced IDdb-linked version of PubMed allows permanent storage of searches in a user's private area on the IDdb server, rather than on the public-access PubMed site.
DrugNet is also host to Meetings Library which houses specially-commissioned reports from major scientific conferences for the pharmaceutical sector. It focuses particularly on new information about drugs in the R&D pipeline. Written by Current Drugs' own staff, the reports contain data that is often undocumented elsewhere and are regarded by the company as one of the best sources of new information on the IDdb.
Another service, Pharma 500, covers the top 500 best-selling drugs. Compiled by Current Drugs, sales data are compiled from annual reports and a range of investment analysts.
Also important is PatentWeb, which covers the last decade of investigational drug patent filings. It combines in-depth indexing to value-added abstracts, making patent information accessible to both scientists and business analysts. Information on patents usually appears within three weeks of the application becoming publicly available. A subscription-based MicroPatent document delivery service gives access to the full patent documents, with those requested being delivered over the Internet as PDF files.
Personal
Users also particularly requested the Personal section. This brings together all the resources of particular interest to an individual user in five different sections:
€ Activity Manager, to keep track of everything a user has done with the database. One click shows a rolling file of the 20 most recent activities.
€ Preferences, used to personalise the layout of various reports and IDdb3 pages.
€ Contribute, which allows comments to be made and centralised for easier management.
€ Profile, containing personal details such as name and email address.
€ Library, containing links to favourite reports which are organised by category.
On top of the basic IDdb3 service, there are also a number of value-added options. These include Dolphin, a database of all known pharmaceutical inventions, the Cochrane Library, which is the leading resource for evidence-based medicine, and EMBASE Alert, which covers over 4000 biomedical journals, some of which are not covered by Medline.
IDdb3uses software written by Current Drugs and is based on underlying Oracle technology. Customers will be able to either install it on their intranets or access it via the Current Drugs' internet site (http://www.current-drugs.com).
"We demonstrated IDdb3 to the majority of our clients throughout the summer and their additional feedback was incorporated into the final product. The response from everyone has been overwhelming and they are all very excited about introducing it to their company as the core intelligence service,“ said European sales director Alison Tipping.
Ddb3 will be launched in the second quarter of 2000.
