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Case MedImmune

Market Intelligence for Research and Development

Yulia, you have been managing the Competitive Intelligence / Library Services operation at MedImmune, Cambridge, formerly known as Cambridge Antibody, since 2001. Please first tell us a little bit about MedImmune / Cambridge Antibody Technologies as a company and its Competitive Intelligence operation.
“MedImmune is a biotechnology company that’s focused on the areas of infectious diseases, cancer and respiratory/inflammatory diseases. The company has three marketed products and an advancing pipeline of new candidates, all designed to treat or prevent a number of debilitating or life-threatening diseases. The company is wholly owned by AstraZeneca, and it employs 3,000 people worldwide
Our Competitive Intelligence function supports mainly our Discovery department that concentrates on early stages of drug development process. Formally the term CI has been used for two years, but we’ve been doing Competitive Intelligence for much longer period.”

What are the functions and processes in your company that Competitive Intelligence function caters to? What do you think are the major challenges and CI needs of these functions?
“Our main end-users are the scientists who are developing the drugs. We also cater to commercial people who support these scientists. We are  providing both a proactive and reactive support with filtered and analysed scientific, market and IP intelligence.

Our scientists need information on relevant academic publications, articles, technologies and IP related issues. They are interested in competitor’s activities as well, especially in drugs that competitors are developing, but also about success and failures in their development process.

I think it is very important to focus on CI also in the very early phases of the drug development process. This is due to the fact that the wrong decision made in early stages are very costly, and people identifying targets for development need to make informed decisions.”


Where do you see the most important success factors in further developing your Market Intelligence operation?
                                                                                                                                                                                 

“The better our scientists & commercial people are informed; better drug candidates can be developed. When you are looking for targets, you don’t know what you don’t know. So it is important to have continuous news feed coming to our scientists, so that they are aware of all the signals that are out there.
                                                                                                                                                                                 

We will also need to have the right technical tools to deliver this information at the right time to the right people. The CAT Intelligence Plaza is serving this purpose extremely well as not only tool for communicating and sharing CI information but also as centralised repository of project related filtered and analysed information. I also would like to mention the  feature for gathering  stats on  usage. It’s the tool for information professional  to monitor the usage of the system and of course, to justify next year budget!

In terms of measuring success, I would say that if each scientist finds a useful article at least once a  week, I would say the system is successful and serves it purpose.”

Many thanks Yulia for the interview, and all the best for your future efforts in building the Market Intelligence operation at MedImmune!