March 12, 2007
Insightful Corporation
Dr. Michael O'Connell
Director of Life Science Solutions
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
We have focused our strengths in statistics, graphics, and reports to solve some high-value business problems for our customers. We have a highly functional and flexible data analysis, graphics and reporting platform, and we have a knack for recognizing high-value use-cases that scale across the industry. This translates into software solutions that are in-step with our customers' immediate and longer-term needs.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The life sciences market is being driven by issues around drug safety and the critical path initiative. Life science companies are demanding faster, better, and cheaper data generation, analysis, and reporting in all phases of the discovery, development, and marketing lifecycle. We see continued growth and opportunity for solutions that (a) automate required analytic processes, and (b) expand the realm of data exploration and information extraction from research and in-market data.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
We have software solutions in clinical graphics, sequential/adaptive clinical trial design, modeling/simulation, clinical data review, safety data mining, clinical study reporting and market analytics. Our S-PLUS language and software is used all the way from exploratory data analysis through regulatory submission, scientific presentation and marketing. The breadth and analytic/graphic depth of our S-PLUS platform for pre-clinical, clinical, non-clinical, and in-market data is unparalleled in the industry.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
We have working relationships with Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, in-market relationships with Spotfire, Pharsight and Affymetrix, and tight integration solutions for SAS, Oracle, DB2 and SQL-Server data sources. We take a market-driven approach to partnering, driven by the needs of our customers. We have a rich and stable set of APIs and our S-PLUS platform offers several robust points of integration through industry-wide file standards and software services.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
We have had considerable success with departmental solutions across discovery research, pre-clinical, early-phase, and late phase clinical and post-marketing. Our current development efforts involve bolstering our S-PLUS Clinical platform to facilitate enterprise-wide statistics, graphics, and reporting. Our long-standing, cross-platform, library-plug-in architecture enables simple multipurposing of analytic functionality. Our solutions have a common theme of specify-once, use-everywhere. This creates considerable efficiencies for our customers by automating reporting tasks, enabling creative modeling, and limiting re-invention of analytics.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Over the next five years I see a more efficient and productive landscape for drug discovery and development, where data and analyses are elevated in functionality and best practices are adopted and standardized in many areas. Over this time frame our software solutions will continue to be adopted across all large pharma, biotech and ag-chem companies to solve production and business critical problems. With our current trajectory, our solution libraries and platform architecture will become a standard across the industry (e.g. FDA and pharma) providing efficient statistical analysis, graphics, and reporting solutions for all phases of discovery, development, and post-marketing.