Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Research using Agile Software

Medical research should not be in a crisis. More people than ever before want its products, and have the money to pay for them. More people than ever want to work in the field as well, and they’re uncannily brilliant and creative. It should be a golden era. So the myriad of problems faced by this industry–sources of revenue slipping away from pharma companies, a shift of investment away from cutting-edge biomedical firms, prices of new drugs going through the roof–must lie with the development processes used in the industry.

Andy Oram

Like many other industries, biomedicine is contrasted with the highly successful computer industry. Although the financial prospects of this field have sagged recently (with hints of an upcoming dot-com bust similar to the early 2000s), there’s no doubt that computer people have mastered a process for churning out new, appealing products and services. Many observers dismiss the comparison between biomedicine and software, pointing out that the former has to deal much more with the prevalence of regulations, the dominance of old-fashioned institutions, and the critical role of intellectual property (patents).

Still, I find a lot of intriguing parallels between how software is developed and how biomedical research becomes products. Coding up a software idea is so simple now that it’s done by lots of amateurs, and Web services can try out and throw away new features on a daily basis. What’s expensive is getting the software ready for production, a task that requires strict processes designed and carried out by experienced professionals. Similarly, in biology, promising new compounds pop up all the time–the hard part is creating a delivery mechanism that is safe and reliable...