Certara, a global provider of model-informed drug development and regulatory science, has added externalization technology to its D360 scientific informatics platform. The resulting new product, D360 Partner, facilitates collaboration between sponsors and their external research partners. Those external collaborators could include academic institutions, contract research organizations or third-party research groups. Those partners all have similar data access and communication requirements to members of an internal research project.

“Prior to the launch of D360 Partner, this type of collaboration required a custom solution, posing challenges both from an information technology and an informatics perspective. Our new solution provides external research partners with highly secure access to only authorized project data,” said David Munro, president, Phoenix Technologies at Certara.

“This new Partner option further expands D360’s ‘faster time to insight’ benefit by enabling external collaborators’ work to be integrated directly into the research project,” he added.

According to Atrium Research, externalization R&D expenditures nearly doubled between 2011 and 2017 in the biopharmaceutical industry. More than 75% of companies have at least one R&D partner, and it is not unheard of for a major company to have more than 100 R&D collaborators across the entire R&D spectrum.

Furthermore, drug discovery outsourcing is continuing to grow in popularity. A recent Visiongain report predicts that it will become a $43.7 billion dollar industry by 2026.

D360 Partner was developed in response to client requests and is now being rolled out at a top 10 pharmaceutical company.

D360 is Certara’s self-service data access, integration, and visualization solution used to query multiple cheminformatics and bioinformatics data sources and make informed go/no-go and next step research decisions. It is used by more than 5,000 scientists worldwide at both large pharmaceutical and specialty research organizations.

D360 Partner provides external collaborators with access to project-specific sponsor queries and data views. They can also use the full suite of D360 analysis and collaboration tools, and share and annotate project-relevant information.

A simple user management system allows partners to be added and removed as projects change.