INCEUTICA providing strategic R&D sourcing solutions
Kurt Mussina, founder, President and CEO of INCEUTICA, believes his company, which offers a neutral, secure channel for buyers and CROs to connect, is just what the industry is looking for to streamline the request for proposal (RFP) process. Our mission is to match the best supply-side solution to a particular buyer's demands at the time they need it, with more efficiency than that buyer can achieve on their own, Mussina said.
INCEUTICA, whose first-generation e-business solution launched in April 2000, is currently working with more than 325 CROs and 90 pharmaceutical/biotech buyers to help them reduce costs and improve cycle times.
If you'sre looking to outsource a study, and you'sre accustomed to working with three or four different CROs that you'sve established relationships with, what INCEUTICA can add is a broader reach into the service provider supply base, Mussina said. For example, if you'sve got to get a study done and your usual service providers are at full capacity INCEUTICA can identify which CROs have the expertise, resources and capacity to get the job done in the time frame you need. We look at the most important attributes of a buyer's demand whether it's expertise, capacity, price or the deliverable date, for example, and match it with the supply side.
For CROs, the site offers opportunities to attract new business at significant cost savings over traditional corporate marketing campaigns and to establish unique relationships that may not have been identified through standard promotional strategies. We'sre giving CROs the ability to get at incremental business much more efficiently to get new customers they might not have had before, Mussina said.
In addition, CROs can use INCEUTICA's services to maximize utilization of their resources. We provide the ability to flatten out their backlog, Mussina said. They can come to us if their Phase I clinic is going to be empty in eight weeks, and sort through our database of Phase I RFPs and bid on those to find opportunities to fill their unused capacity.
Buyers pay a subscription-based fee to post RFPs, and CROs pay a percentage of transactions only on client relationships established with INCEUTICA's assistance.
Although, at 26 employees, the company is still relatively small, the group has big plans for the future. In August last year, INCEUTICA received $4 million in Series A funding from the Redleaf Group, which has been used primarily to develop a second-generation Web site.
We'sve been spending a lot of time, since the launch of the site last April, working with both pharmaceutical companies and contract service providers to develop the newest generation of the site, Mussina said. We wanted to make sure that the assumptions we made about the industry's needs were, in fact, correct. In addition, we wanted to ensure that our operation is bullet proof that we have all of the systems and processes in place to actually make it happen. We don'st want to go out and promise the world and not be able to deliver.
As Mussina points out, the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of confidentiality concerns. INCEUTICA has therefore devoted itself to integrating proprietary and commercial security features into its processes from both a business process and IT perspective.
We have deliberately not turned all of the faucets on at once, he said. But we'sre getting ready to do that in this next phase. We'sre confident that we have all of the systems, procedures and processes in place we'sre secure and confidential.
INCEUTICA is scheduled to launch its new site on April 2nd in San Diego at eyeforpharma West 2001, a conference focusing on e-R&D for the pharmaceutical industry.
But the company doesn'st plan to stop there. We have several things in the works, including services for contract and document management, invoices and change orders, Mussina said. Most of our solutions come from listening to the needs of our customers.
Our vision is an end-to-end sourcing solution for drug development not just outsourcing, but whatever you need - services, compounds, technologies or materials, Mussina continued. The priority list is being driven by the users. And a lot of it is around the standardization of the proposal (RFP) process.
Standards are a big focus for INCEUTICA. Kevin Johnson, Senior Director of Strategy and Operations for INCEUTICA recently joined the Industry Advisory Board of CDISC, the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium. CDISC is a non-profit organization dedicated to leading the development of global, vendor-neutral, platform-independent standards to improve data quality and accelerate product development in the pharmaceutical industry.
CDISC is a great example of a cross-organizational group, and their vision is the same one we have in thinking about the sourcing process, Johnson said. We'sre using CDISC as a model for some of the things we want to do long term to bring the industry together across organizational boundaries to break down those barriers and move the whole industry forward as efficiently as possible.
INCEUTICA also finds there is much to learn from examining the successes and failures of e-business applications in other industries. They believe a good parallel to the pharmaceutical industry can be found in aerospace.
NexPrise is an e-business much like INCEUTICA, and what they'sve been able to offer their clients is pretty compelling, Mussina said. Boeing Rocketdyne was able, through NexPrise, to reduce development times by 50% (from two years to one) and reduce manufacturing cycle times by 63%. The bottom line is that very complex, technically challenging and high-risk projects, like R&D sourcing, have benefited tremendously from e-business initiatives. I'sm not saying that INCEUTICA is going to be able to single-handedly cut drug development times from 12-15 years down to five, but we'sre certainly trying to facilitate that.
INCEUTICA executives are intrigued by the aerospace industry's purchase of services in anticipation of future needs. What we'sre starting to see in that industry is essentially the buying of options contracts. In drug development for example, a pharmaceutical company could look at its pipeline and calculate that in three years it will need to run 15 Phase I studies. Perhaps they'sll need to outsource half of those, so instead of waiting three years, they can go out now and buy an option on that drug development capacity. If you know somebody's the expert in that type of study, you can secure their capacity now with an options contract.
INCEUTICA is proving it is a company always looking toward the future. According to Mussina, INCEUTICA is separated from its competitors by its strong domain expertise. With more than 120 combined years of industry experience, the company believes it has a unique ability to respond to the needs of its clients.
We certainly have competitors who have stepped onto the horizon recently, said Mussina. But we'sre listening to the marketplace, and we'sre putting a model in front of them that's responsive to their needs. Our competitors are really just helping to justify the marketplace and the need for this service.
To learn more about INCEUTICA, visit the company's Web site at (INCEUTICA.com).