LeadDiscovery revolutionizes scientific surveillance with the launch of DailyUpdates

E Sussex, UK --- 27th November, 2002 --- Over 10,000 scientific articles are published each week. The task of selecting those that are of direct relevance to drug discovery is both time consuming and often spurious. LeadDiscovery's most recent service, DailyUpdates, is about to help revolutionize this problematic area of scientific surveillance. 

Over 10,000 scientific articles are published each week.  While most of these push forward the frontiers of science only a small proportion can be considered central to the identification of new therapeutic targets.  Identifying these represents a difficult and time-consuming task for busy drug development personnel. 

DailyUpdates, the latest drug discovery tool from LeadDiscovery has minimized these problems delivering a brand new scientific surveillance tool to the drug discovery sector.

Based on proprietary search strategies which track new publications in over 30,000 journals, DailyUpdates technology short-lists papers which are screened by a panel of industrial R&D experts.  The panel uses its drug development experience to select out articles of especial interest. 

Selected articles are delivered to the drug development sector in much the same way as a newsfeed via the DailyUpdates applet which can be found on LeadDiscovery's website or on a growing list of pharmaceutical, medical and research portals.

Dr Jon Goldhill, CEO of the drug development consultants, LeadDiscovery has witnessed first hand the problem of scientific surveillance during his time with French pharmaceutical giants Sanofi-Synthelabo.  In a recent interview Dr Goldhill recounted “I would spend hours in the library or on-line just to find a few breaking articles central to my target discovery activities. This always seemed so time consuming and I usual felt that my time could be better spent doing other things”.

The frustration experienced by Dr Goldhill is shared by many in the pharmaceutical industry.  Part of the problem is that it is often difficult to use simple key word searches to identify articles that describe landmark data.  Literature searches run the risk of missing crucial information whilst regularly reading table of contents is simply too time consuming. The defining aspect of DailyUpdates is the combination of electronic and human selection processes thus minimizing both of this problems in one stroke.

DailyUpdates is receiving rapidly growing interest. Says Peter Barfoot, CEO of the pharmaceutical portal, BioPortfolio "we were involved in the beta test of DailyUpdates and the potential of this service quickly became apparent.  Newsfeeds have been around for a long time but this is the first time that it has become possible for drug development personnel to track scientific articles of key importance to their work."

Continues Peter Barfoot "one feature of DailyUpdates that our audience has found particularly appealing is that titles appearing in DailyUpdates are categorized into major therapeutic areas.  This allows individuals involved in fields such cancer, metabolic diseases and inflammation to get straight to those articles of personnel interest"

Concludes Dr Goldhill “the speed with which users and websites are taking up DailyUpdates suggests that in the very near future, this service will be a leading scientific surveillance tool.  I am not surprised, I wish someone had developed DailyUpdates when I was at the bench".

LeadDiscovery is a UK based pharmaceutical consultancy company (www.leaddiscovery.co.uk) specializing in drug discovery, development and commercialization.

To evaluate please go to either:

http://www.leaddiscovery.co.uk/target-discovery/index.html 

or

http://www.bioportfolio.com/ldapplet/ 

To view summary and to order LeadDiscovery dossiers - click here!