Drug development is a tremendous challenge for most pharmaceutical companies today. To launch any new drug, investments of $1 billion and 10 years are common, and, all too often, promising candidates fail to become manufacturable and marketable therapies.

Efforts such as the Critical Path initiative, supported by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), are underway to improve results. But, until now, there has been no standard way for any drug company to compare its drug development and manufacturing efforts with product development efforts of top performers, both within the drug industry and across all global manufacturing industries.

Pharmaceutical Manufacturing magazine and APQC, a leading nonprofit research firm, are addressing the need for actionable and accurate benchmarking data with two new studies in innovation and product development. These studies will separately examine how innovative pharmaceutical companies are, and how efficient they are at moving new drugs from concept to reality, highlighting areas they can improve.

Traditionally, gaining such insights has required working with expensive consulting firms or participating in academic research projects that may take years to complete.

In contrast, these benchmarking initiatives will allow any participating pharmaceutical manufacturer to see, at no cost and within a matter of months, how their product development and innovation practices compare with those of "best in class," leaders both within the pharmaceutical industry, and in global manufacturing.

Findings from this research project will be published in articles in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing next year, and benchmarking reports will be sent to all participants at no cost.

APQC's innovation and product development research are part of the Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative SM (OSBC) research sponsored by IBM, designed to provide an overview of the practices and processes that top organizations have in place to achieve peak performance. APQC's research:

-- uses commonly accepted measures and processes,
-- reduces time and costs of benchmarking--no charge for participating,
-- provides cross-industry and peer group comparisons,
-- identifies performance drivers and best practices, and
-- ensures participant data are safeguarded by APQC--all data are kept confidential.

Pharmaceutical Manufacturing magazine, a media partner of APQC's, is the only publication devoted exclusively to drug manufacturing and scaleup.

Part of Putman Media LLC's Pharma Group, the magazine, its sister web sites www.PharmaManufacturing.com and www.KnowPharma.com and digital publications, are dedicated to sharing the best practices that will help drug industry professionals improve product quality while ensuring regulatory compliance, reduce cycle times, empower staff and reduce both the time to market and cost of new drugs.

Founded in 1977, APQC is a member-based nonprofit research association serving organizations around the world in all sectors of business, education and government. Its mission is to identify best practices, discover effective methods of improvement, and broadly disseminate findings. For more information, please visit www.apqc.org.

To take the benchmarking surveys, please visit:
www.apqc.org/pharma-inn
or
www.PharmaManufacturing.com.