For example, Pfizer’s scientists often use one database to examine the chemical structures of compounds in order to make assessments about their viability as drug targets. And then they have to transfer that information into a completely different piece of software from another vendor to assess that molecule’s biological properties or safety. As a result, Roberts and his department are constantly faced with the challenge of building application programming interfaces (APIs) between different systems and databases.

Although vendors are beginning to offer more modular systems that can plug in to other systems or well-documented APIs in an effort to garner a bigger chunk of this billion-dollar business, many are still hawking closed, standalone systems. "We’re able to push vendors more and more to work with open standards, but when someone has a monopoly position, you don’t have a lot of leverage," says AstraZeneca’s Fasman, who works closely with his IS counterparts to deal with such problems.

The number of mergers and acquisitions in the drug industry further complicates the integration issue. Recent major drug marriages include Warner-Lambert with Pfizer, and SmithKline Beecham with Glaxo Wellcome to produce the Middlesex, England-based GlaxoSmithKline. "Everyone has different databases," says Dinerstein of Aventis, which was formed by the merger of Hoechst Marion Roussel with Rhone-Poulenc Rorer in 1999. "We have immense amounts of data, but our first task is to figure out how to make that data accessible."

Culture Shock

One of the thorniest impediments to informatics is not technical integration, but cultural assimilation. "The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most hidebound industries in the world," says Alan Hillyard, senior vice president of cheminformatics research in the San Diego office of Lion Bioscience, which is based in Heidelberg, Germany. "They don’t want to adapt to anything. They had one guy working in a lab in the 1900s, and that’s the way they still want to do it. They have the most sophisticated tools, and they want to be cutting edge, but there’s still that attitude of ’We’ve always done it this way.’"

Some compare the traditional process of drug development to spending millions to build an airplane and then simply sending it off a cliff to see if it flies. But just as the aviation industry slowly began to integrate bits and pieces of computer-aided design and modeling 30 years ago -- and Boeing completely changed its development cycle to go straight from in silico design to production on its 777 aircraft in 1995 -- some predict a similarly dramatic change in the way pharmaceutical companies develop medicines.