Core Projects

Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of R&D: Lab of the Future

The Pistoia Alliance is pleased to announce a new webinar series as part of our overall theme of Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of R&D. Each webinar will explore the power of collaboration to solve shared challenges, drive transformation and reduce barriers to innovation in R&D.

The Lab is the center of innovation but the role and nature of the Lab has changed. These changes are being driven by advances in life science research, technology, and latterly, COVID-19.

What are the latest developments in the workspace, facilities planning, and technology?
What new innovations including collaborative digitalization can we expect to see in the Lab of Future?

Learn from industry experts and thought leaders as they share the latest trends and best practices in life sciences R&D and discuss how we can collaborate to innovate.

Helping Scientists Stay Safe Through the Chemical Safety Library

This webinar co-hosted by The Pistoia Alliance and CAS will engage a panel of experts to highlight how scientists and research organizations can reduce the risk of adverse chemical safety events in their labs using the Chemical Safety Library, an open-access platform for searching and sharing hazardous reaction information crowd-sourced from scientists in academic, industry, and government labs around the world.

Learn more about:

The value of crowdsourcing to improve chemical lab safety globally
What the Chemical Safety Library contains
How you can use and contribute to the Chemical Safety Library
Building a safety-focused culture in your lab

Laboratory of the Future 2022: Why Cross-Industry Collaboration can Increase Opportunities to Create the Life Science Industry

Featured Session from Lab of the Future 2022: Why Cross-Industry Collaboration Can Increase Opportunities to Create the Life Science Industry Lab of the Future

Speaker: Anca Ciobanu, Strategic Lead, Pistoia Alliance

The Lab of the Future is a generic term that was, and still is, being used by many life science organizations to define how their current laboratories will tend to transform with the impacts of digitalization and automation.

The complexity of building an integrated ecosystem of people, processes, technology, and data requires a strategy that embraces a multidisciplinary approach. Many organizations developed their in-house capabilities and had to face different challenges along the way, at their own risk and expense.

By bringing together the industry players into a pre-competitive environment, the Pistoia Alliance helps them identify the common bottlenecks in their digitalization path and learn from each other – as much from their missteps as from their successes – devise common solutions to these common problems with shared-risk, shared-reward business model.

Anca Ciobanu, program lead for the Pistoia Alliance’s Lab of the Future Community, will share some of the key challenges and opportunities organizations face today, along with some examples of Pistoia Alliance member-driven initiatives to highlight the power of pre-competitive collaboration in advancing digitalization and automation on the path towards their Lab of the Future.

2021 Quantum Computing Community Summit

The Quantum Computing Community of Interest Summit is hosted by the Pistoia Alliance, Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), QuPharm Alliance, and Quantum Practical Application Research Community (QPARC) quantum communities.

The aim of this community is to accelerate the adoption of quantum computing in the pharmaceutical industry. Our most recent community survey identified the lack of relevant use cases as the biggest barrier to adoption. This session will tackle this by looking at quantum use cases from leading organizations, and include a panel discussion to explore potential next steps for the industry.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to:

Understand needs and potential use cases for Quantum in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Demystifying UX Skillsets

Join our expert panelists as they explain the reasons they came together to define a framework that would support teams in understanding UX skillsets. The panelists will explain how they derived 3 skill sets and explain them to the audience.

What is UX?
User Experience (UX) encompasses the end-user’s interaction with a product, tool, or system. It involves deeply understanding users through research, organizing information, visual design (and more), all with the goal of meeting user needs and doing it elegantly. This is especially important in the life sciences, where users are scientists in a complex environment, and more usable, efficient tools can accelerate innovation.

UX skillsets can be confusing
The differences in UX skillsets are confusing enough for people who have been in the field for 20 years. There are no common frameworks that the industry buys into and can universally agree on and the world keeps changing. People who hire and work with UX and Design people find it hard to define what they really need, or worse want everything (the unicorn).

A framework to understand UX skillsets
This team came together to articulate a problem in the life sciences space. They have come up with a framework to help non-UX literate managers, peers, and recruiters to understand the skills, activities they might need to look for when building their teams.

Speakers

Sven Neumeyer, Global Lead Business Analysis and User Research, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
Jason Mesut, Principal Consultant, Resonant Design and Innovation Ltd
Joseph Rossetto, UX/UI Specialist, Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre

UXLS 2021 Conference: Research, Design, and Build

Data and UX Heuristics

This set of heuristics will help you to better apply good design practices when working with data driven projects.

Research, Design & Build

How To Create A Flexible User Research & Product Planning Database For The UX Pipeline

Synthesizing user research is messy, especially in the complex world of life sciences. The typical output of siloed research briefs often lacks durability across projects, transparency in synthesis rationale and derived decisions, and accessibility by stakeholders outside the design team. This session will dive into how the double-diamond design philosophy manifests into diverse user research artifacts and methods for structuring and synthesizing these artifacts in a centralized research database like Airtable to facilitate the design process and extend their value to the rest of your organization.

UXLS 2021 Keynote Address: Three Simple Wishes

Being a Research Scientist is a challenging role without the additional complexity of working with a plethora of Tech systems. Focusing on UX in Life Science Tech provides the opportunity to not just alleviate this complexity, but completely rethink the way scientists use Tech to achieve their goals.

Having led both scientists and Tech teams, Julie will offer some unique insights into what it’s like to be a user within a lab environment, and the provider of the Tech solutions they rely on day-to-day. Using some real-world examples from the labs, this talk will show how a focus on UX and Design can really make a difference to their jobs, and through this the value they can deliver to patients.

Julie will also offer her three wishes of Tech, from enterprise teams to vendors, that will pave the way for a better user experience for scientists.

Speaker

Julie Huxley-Jones Vice President, Research Solutions, GSK

Projects

Communities