Pistoia Alliance Launches App Catalogue And Community

BOSTON, MA, April 9, 2013 - The Pistoia Alliance, a not-for-profit, precompetitive alliance of life science companies, technology vendors, commercial information suppliers and academic groups that promotes innovation through precompetitive collaboration, has launched a dedicated life sciences app catalogue.  

Devised in collaboration with AirWatch, the leading provider of enterprise app catalogues and device management tools, the catalogue, which can be found at http://apps.pistoiaalliance.org, is the first dedicated life sciences app catalogue, holding a range of apps including Open Drug Discovery Teams (ODDT)1, Green Solvents2 and TB Mobile3.

In 2012, the Pistoia Alliance set up a team to look into how it could develop a strategy using apps to promote innovation.  John Wise, Executive Director of the Pistoia Alliance, said: “With a core mission of improving interoperability between organisations in the life sciences ecosystem, looking at mobile applications was a logical step for the Pistoia Alliance. Apps are now increasingly common in everyday life, but not in life sciences. We hope the new app catalogue will act as a creative spur to get existing apps more widely known and used and also to encourage more apps to be developed.”

Ingrid Akerblom leader of the Pistoia Alliance team added: “We decided to build an app catalogue purely for life science apps and believe this dedicated space will enable scientists to easily access the apps that will help their research. More importantly, we expect the environment will become a vibrant community where scientists can communicate directly with each other and to app creators regarding functionality, further driving innovation for life sciences. For the app creators, the space represents a marketplace where scientists who use their apps can contact them directly to expand app capabilities for use on internal proprietary data at their companies. We imagine the catalogue as a true showcase for innovation that further drives the Pistoia Alliance mission.”

Sean Ekins, Pistoia Alliance board member, said: “The Open Drug Discovery Teams app was developed as part of a Pistoia Alliance icebreaker event in 2012 as a way to collect and present open information from social media and the web for neglected and rare diseases. Without a dedicated science appstore this app and others we have developed are lost in the hundreds of thousands of other apps that are not science related.  It is pretty clear that scientists and life scientists need a dedicated appstore if we are going to use them assist in research and increase productivity as apps have contributed to other businesses.”    

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For further information please contact:
http://www.pistoiaalliance.org/contact-us.html

Notes to Editors:

About the Pistoia Alliance:

The Pistoia Alliance was established as a members’ organization in 2009. Today, it encompasses life science companies, academic groups, informatics vendors, and publishers. Together, Pistoia Alliance members aim to lower barriers to innovation by improving the interoperability of R&D business processes through precompetitive collaboration. The organisation focuses on bringing stakeholders to the table to define common, conceptual steps of the life science R&D workflow.
As such, it serves to:

•    Assemble and aggregate common use cases
•    Facilitate conversation, collaboration, and innovation
•    Incubate and deliver concepts and pilot projects that support precompetitive collaboration
•    Develop and iterate business models for information-based services that reflect the changing life science marketplace and the pressures for innovation

We believe a solid working relationship among all stakeholders will evolve a global, collaborative information ecosystem that can resolve emerging challenges in the precompetitive domains of life science R&D.

About AirWatch:

AirWatch is the leading provider of enterprise mobility management software. More information can be found at http://www.air-watch.com.