R&D consulting

Our team supported a leading pharmaceutical player in analyzing the opportunities offered by the use of artificial intelligence solutions in its R&D processes. The objective of our teams was to make our client’s teams aware of the latest developments in the academic world and competing pharmaceutical companies in the field.

To do so, we carried out a state of the art of AI in R&D in the world, presenting the field of possibilities illustrated by concrete cases of competitors. Following this initial work, we supported our client in the integration of artificial intelligence technologies int its R&D activities, and helped it launch first internal pilot projects.

A client wanted to understand what the potential lead indications would be best suited to prove the therapeutic value of its immune regulatory platform.

Alcimed conducted an analysis of the state-of-the-science, helped prioritize potential therapeutic cellular targets to place into R&D to regulate complement fixation both when it creates or prevents disease, and recommended potential academic and private research labs to collaborate with as part of the client’s R&D strategy and capability requirements roadmap.

An innovative biotech companies asked for our help to strengthen its pipeline evaluation process, to be more robust, systematic and reproductible across its current and future drug development programs, as well as more specific to its strategic vision, culture, and organization.

After aligning the executive team around a common vision of the process need, Alcimed brought inspirational benchmarks and led the collaborative building of a new process of stage-gated evaluation and decision-making of its existing and future pipeline.

The R&D portfolio strategy department of a pharmaceutical company needed help to lead its choice of the next diseases to invest research & development for, based on a first high-level landscaping of five markets of interest (high medical unmet need).

Alcimed reconstructed such landscapes by analyzing critical industry parameters (epidemiology, unmet need, competition now and in development, etc.) and in the end gave a go/no-go, prioritization and “how to” recommendation.

We helped a leading company in the space industry improve its R&D strategy. Our client’s main challenge was to build a reference framework that would enable it to assess the relevance of the projects in its R&D portfolio. It would allow our client to objectively decide which project to pursue or discontinue, and ultimately optimize performance.

We carried out an initial internal phase aimed at understanding the existing R&D process, its pain points and the key criteria to be considered in order to optimize project analysis. We then benchmarked with comparable companies (very long product cycles, substantial R&D investment, ….) to understand best practices and pitfalls to avoid in this area.

All the elements gathered enabled us to build a customized reference framework (criteria, an evaluation scale for each criterion, metrics, etc.) integrating the dimensions of strategic fit, business elements, degree of innovation, human aspects, etc.

We helped the R&D department of a leading food and beverage company to understand the current legislation regarding the use of CBD and cannabis in food and beverages, with the aim of developing new products for the European and North American markets.

After a first step of exploring the target markets (trends, existing products on the market, health claims, legislative framework, etc.) we characterized the regulations (current or future) in a selection of countries through an in-depth literature analysis and targeted interviews (regulators, experts).

This work enabled our client’s R&D department to define a framework for the development of new CBD-based products.

We supported a biotechnology company in the realization of a state of the art in the field of oligonucleotides (oligonucleotides consist of short segments of nucleic acids: RNA or DNA).

In a context of growth and consequently of evolution of its R&D activities, our client wanted to acquire oligonucleotides technologies or to establish a partnership with an expert company in the field. Having a limited vision of this complex domain at a global level, our client called our team to carry out a state of the art aiming at identifying and characterizing existing technologies and companies worldwide, in order to select a panel of technologies and associated players of interest for our client.

In the end, our project enabled our client to start discussions with 3 selected key players and to decide on an important investment for the future of its Research & Development activities.

The R&D division of one of our clients, a leading player in the pharmaceutical industry, wanted to identify potential partners in the in-silico field, meaning offering complex calculation tools and computer models.

In order to support our client in achieving this objective, our teams have mapped out in-silico players, offering pharmaceutical applications. Through an exhaustive bibliographic search and in-depth interviews with several opinion leaders in the sector, our teams were able to identify the main trends in the sector, the most promising applications and approaches, as well as obtain a precise vision of the main players active on the subject. The market dynamics of the next 3 years were also studied, as well as the different technologies meeting our client’s criteria.

Finally, the players in the sector identified were described on the basis of the technologies and offers proposed, the quality of their proofs of concept, their applications, their business models and their already existing partnerships.