In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I’m joined by Manu Vohra, Managing Director, Global Life Sciences for Box, for a conversation on collaboration in the life sciences industry.
In the last decade, the life sciences industry has undergone significant digital transformation. The industry is also facing increased market pressures, is collectively navigating new (and sometimes ever-changing) regulations, and, of course, has been fueled by the need to navigate a global pandemic. As a result, it’s become paramount for all players in the life sciences industry, from pharmaceutical companies and researchers to manufacturers and the supply chain, to share research, data, and resources with their partner ecosystem to facilitate innovation, ensure compliance and security, and also deliver more efficiently and rapidly on patient outcomes. Speaking of patient outcomes, life sciences organizations are looking at solutions to help improve patient outcomes, but that’s not always an easy process, especially when it comes to applications and document storage. So, what can these organizations do to address these challenges?
In our conversation, Manu and I covered the following:
- Digitization is no longer optional. Breaking down siloed collaboration channels and facilitating real-time sharing is table stakes for today’s Life Sciences organizations.
- Life Sciences is a heavily regulated industry, and there are some security and compliance considerations that organizations need to heed. There are some very real reasons that “the way we’ve always done it” thinking not work anymore.
- Sharing patient data brings its own set of challenges with security and compliance, something made even more complicated when various members of a team are in different locations around the world.
- Collaboration needs in life sciences organizations have changed and Manu shared insights on those shifts.
- Technology is playing a big role in helping Life Sciences organizations address the challenges they face. Manu shared a little about Content Cloud for Life Sciences from Box and why this solution warrants consideration.
- The key benefits of Content Cloud for Life Sciences and why integrations and a robust set of APIs is a game-changer.
This was a great conversation and one that you’ll definitely want to make time to watch, listen, or read about if you’re working in the Life Sciences sector and trying to get arms around the collaboration, content, regulation, and compliance demands of your organization. We developed a research brief in partnership with Box that you’ll find here: The Content Cloud for Life Sciences Securely Streamlines Seamless Collaboration.
Watch the full video of my conversation with Manu here:
Or stream the audio here:
You will also find more information from Box about their solutions for the Life Sciences industry on their website, and I encourage you to check that out. And feel free to find and connect with Manu Vorha on LinkedIn, I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear from you and answer any questions you might have.
If you’ve not yet subscribed to the Futurum Tech Webcast, hit the ‘subscribe’ button while you’re there and you won’t miss an episode.
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Shelly Kramer: Hello and welcome to the The Futurum Tech Webcast. I’m Shelly Kramer, principal analyst here at Futurum Research. And today I’m joined by Manu Vohra, managing director global life sciences for Box. We’re going to have a conversation today about collaboration in the life sciences industry.
In the last decade. It’s a little bit of an understatement to say that the life sciences industry has undergone significant digital transformation. In fact, I think just about every industry has. But today we’re talking about life sciences. The industry’s also facing enormous market pressures, navigating new regulations, new and ever changing regulations, I should say, and dealing with the continued impact of a tiny little global pandemic.
As a result, it’s become even more important for all players in the life sciences industry, from pharmaceutical companies, researchers, manufacturers, and the entire supply chain to share research data and resources within their partner ecosystems. This allows the ability for quick innovation, which of course is important. Think vaccine development, for just one example. But quick innovations on solutions that improve patient outcomes the world over. All of that is easy to say and a lot more difficult to actually make a reality. We’re going to talk today a little bit about what organizations in the life science industries can do to improve, how they can use technology to help spur innovation, and I think it’s going to be a fascinating conversation. Manu, welcome to the show.
Manu Vohra: Thanks, Shelly. Thanks Futurum team for having me. Like Shelly said, my name is Manu. I lead life sciences for Box. I work for a tech company now, but I actually came from life sciences. I grew up in the life sciences, as you say. My first job out of college was working for a little company called Schering-Plough, which is now part of Merck, working on a consent decree program, which was basically the FDA saying, “We’re going to padlock you guys unless you get your act together.” It was a fun little baptism but fire way to start my career.
Shelly Kramer: No pressure.
Manu Vohra: Yeah, no pressure at all. About 200 people thrown onto a project with the FDA breathing down your neck was a lot of fun. For sure, it taught me a lot of things. But yeah, happy to be here today and speak about how the life sciences have changed and what the pandemic impact has been and how we’re progressing.
Shelly Kramer: Well, I can’t wait to dive in. We’re going to start with a little background. Obviously, we know that life sciences organizations are looking at solutions to help with patient outcomes. Let’s talk a little bit if we could, about document storage and the role that plays in delivering on better patient outcomes.
Manu Vohra: Sure. There’s a lot of content. It used to be called documents. The industry term used to be document management. That slowly changed to content management, because documents turned into essentially videos and audio files and images. Now that’s changed basically from content management to cloud content management because everything is going to the cloud, but the concept still remains. Traditionally, the way we used to manage documents were all around manual processes. Like literally submitting documents through clinical trials involved, literally filling up a truck full of files and folders and sending it down I-95. That’s how we used to actually manage physical documents.
A lot of the older processes are kind of still there and we’ve grown from there a little bit. Digital transformation was a term that was happening about 10 years ago when people started moving to the cloud. But just the way that tech stacks have evolved has still put documents across various different repositories. I still have some documents sitting in a file, literally in a filing cabinet. Some is sitting with one vendor, some is sitting on an on-premise application. There’s still a lot of silos across the landscape.
How that changed a little bit in the pandemic was some of the manual processes around these documents got digitized overnight. Some companies did a great job by essentially doing the cut over. Some of them were running around trying to figure this out. But I think it’s been a normalizing factor in the industry for us, but the content fragmentation problem is still something we’re trying to solve.
Shelly Kramer: I say this a lot, I think that I’m a bit of an eternal optimist and I’m also really pragmatic. But what I look at when I think about it, when I talk with people all over the technology space about navigating a global pandemic, is that there are a lot of silver linings and this is one of them I think. When you’re forced to embrace rapid change, sometimes that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think the thing that organizations quickly learned is that digitization is no longer optional and that real time sharing and regulations and being able to do more facilitated by technology is really what’s super important.
I think that whether you’re talking about something as simple as patient document records, aren’t we all patients and haven’t we all had to deal with getting our records or getting our records from one provider to another provider? And haven’t we all said, “There’s just got to be an easier way?” And that’s just at a really granular level with one small example. But when you look at it in terms of gigantic organizations there’s some really important needs there. Right?
Manu Vohra: Absolutely. At a micro level, an example is, just clinical sites where patients go in to get drugs. You would normally have those patient records in a folder in a filing cabinet. Several of the clinical sites actually maintain them that way. Then you have these monitors that literally fly out to these sites to go inspect them or review them periodically. When the pandemic hit, and then travel restrictions are still in place. But clinical trials started back up, there was no way for the monitors to actually get out to the clinical site, so they had to digitize them. They were forced to do that.
In the beginning of the pandemic, you literally had people holding files up to the Zoom cameras to showcase what they’re doing. Can you imagine? Like you said, there’s got to be a better way, and people figured it out pretty quickly from there.
Shelly Kramer: Well, and it’s one of those things, again, silver lining, is that a lot of times companies, organizations of all sizes, with the very best of intentions make a to-do list and … this is top priority, this is top priority, whatever. And even though they know they need to do this, digitize their documents, sometimes it doesn’t make that to the top of a list. I do feel like the pandemic benefited all of us as a whole in terms of forcing that to happen. Big silver lining for sure.
Manu Vohra: Absolutely. There’s multiple silver linings that came out of it. Another one at the macro level is around essentially general collaboration between researchers and R&D. Today, innovation can come from an organization of any size in any part of the planet because you have so many people working on, especially in the therapeutic areas like oncology, there’s a lot of investment flowing there. There’s a lot of biotechs, a lot of research going on in cancer research. And you have these small biotechs with four or five people working on them and breakthroughs can come from anywhere and any size.
Now in that scenario, you need to be able to work outside your digital walls to collaborate with all these innovation vectors that are coming up there. And then what the pandemic did, was it forced larger companies that were generally walled off to start working even with their competitors. The reason for that is, normally R&D costs are really high, but this time it’s time-boxed. We have to get things done. We have to get it done faster. So competitors literally started sharing molecule data and research data just to reduce the cost and also increase the time to bring therapies to market. I think that’s a great thing, essentially for humanity, but for the life sciences industry to also get a hold of all the R&D costs.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I want to shift a little bit and talk about the fact that of course, as we all know, life sciences is a heavily regulated industry and there are these little things called security and compliance that organizations need to think about it.
I want to preface this. This just popped into my head when I’m thinking about it. Because even today I cannot tell you how many times somebody, an organization, sometimes very big companies, ask me for information, ask me for PII, personally identifiable information, that they would like for me to put into an Excel spreadsheet and email to them. Or they would like me to put into an email and send to them. Or documents, or whatever. And because security is one of my coverage areas, because I’m a little bit of a freak about security, and because I know way more than many ordinary average people do about security, I understand the huge risks that are associated with that.
Then when you extrapolate that out to the life sciences industry and healthcare in general and research organizations who are huge targets for cyber threat actors, security … Of course compliance is its own animal and that’s incredibly important. But security is no small thing. I’d love to hear from you a little bit about why the way we’ve always done it thinking is absolutely positively not going to cut it anymore.
Manu Vohra: Yeah. We’re living in a flattening world and both security and compliance have actually never been more important for the life sciences today. I think one out of three of my customers carries ransomware insurance. That wasn’t a thing even five years ago. That just goes to show how much a threat this is. Even though the tools we’re using have kind of evolved to be better at handling security, not everybody’s using them, and the processes around all these heavily regulated and high value items like patient records and HIPAA records and those types of things, we don’t have the right processes and governance controls around these.
We’re still using the old processes, which means even if you have the right tools, you’re not using them. It’s tantamount to putting a square peg through a round hole. We have update the processes around our applications today. Yeah, I completely agree. It’s the same story from the compliance side of the house as well. You are working to sell more drugs or devices in other parts of the planet and every country you go to, you need to follow slightly nuanced or different regulations. It essentially increases the overall cost of the compliance ecosystem, because you’re working with several healthcare authorities right now with all of their own controls.
In this scenario, if you’re using older processes, it gets extremely tedious to get anywhere, to release any new innovations, or therapeutic areas in new parts of the world.
Shelly Kramer: Well, it can be for sure a little mind-boggling when you start thinking about this in a global manner. And regulations in the United States are one thing, and Canada is another thing, and APAC is another thing, and it really is mind-boggling. Being able to rely on technology solutions that can help facilitate that is incredibly important.
Manu Vohra: Absolutely.
Shelly Kramer: Let’s talk a little bit now if we could, you mentioned this before. Are there other things that we should touch on in terms of collaboration and life sciences organizations? Or have we already covered that?
Manu Vohra: No, there’s lots. I could talk about it all day, but yeah-
Shelly Kramer: I kind of thought so.
Manu Vohra: Yeah, I think some of the key themes are, if you accept the premise that you have to collaborate today externally in order to bring the right innovations to market, then you’ll also have to update your processes and your tech stack base to essentially support those new ways of working. Just the way the applications and tech stack has evolved, we used to go out in the life sciences and go buy applications for each and every individual solution. Then when we went into the cloud 10 years ago and that cloud adoption has been increasing, we kept the buying patterns stayed the same. We still kept buying individual applications only instead of on premise applications, we’re buying them from cloud vendors.
Essentially that’s basically created all the same levels of silos and the fragmentation, but where we really need to go in the future is to change the way we think of solutions and content management across an organization from being individual point solution-based to be more of a platform. I think those software decisions today are slowly becoming platform decisions. I can’t go to a conference today without everybody saying that they’re a platform.
Shelly Kramer: You are correct.
Manu Vohra: Yeah, that’s another problem. Not everybody is a platform. Some are. But that’s definitely the direction where we’re going.
Shelly Kramer: It is. 100. I go to more conferences than I can count with the number of clients that we have in the technology space and you are 100% correct. Everybody says they’re a platform. Everybody wants to be a platform.
But stepping back from that, when you think about what happens across, especially the enterprise, but this happens in small to midsize companies as well, somebody stumbles across some, “Oh, this tech solution sounds great, I’m going to buy this.” And somebody else is buying this one and somebody else is buying this one. And pretty soon you’ve got this proliferation of solutions that aren’t connected in any way, that aren’t talking to each other in any way. In many instances that IT doesn’t even know you’re using. That creates its own very large nightmare, and certainly creates, as you said, silos that can be very, very difficult. Now I want to talk a little bit about cloud content for life sciences from Box, and why this is a solution that may not be on your radar screen, but we think you might want to learn more about it. Let’s hear about it.
Manu Vohra: Yeah, absolutely. At Box, this is the problem we’re trying to solve, is to essentially bring content management as a horizontal solution across the enterprise. There’s content across the enterprise, we want to be able to capture that and manage that right across the enterprise. We’re not here to solve individual solution problems, but we’re a platform. The story there is, to be able to support content management needs across the enterprise, which will essentially end up supporting upstream and downstream processes. Because whatever process you’re working on today, let’s say you’re working on a drug discovery process, you find a molecule, you’re working on it, later on it’s going to go into clinical trials, then it goes into regulatory submissions, and eventually you start selling the drugs. Now you’re putting that information into PowerPoint decks and sales materials and eventually it’s going to get onto the manufacturing floor.
Now, moving that information across from each part of the value chain, if you have multiple solutions, it becomes almost impossible if not tedious. That’s essentially the horizontal integration that we’re proposing to try to solve. I mentioned earlier how everybody’s bringing up their own solutions. In order to solve this what a lot of people also are doing today is bundling a lot of solutions. If you think about going to a fruit vendor and this guy has the best apples and you’re going to go buy the best apples ever made, and you’re buying there, you buy some apples, but he also got some pears next to it, and he’s going to bundle the apples with the pears. Now do you buy the apples with the pears? Or do you go to the guy in the back who sells the best pears?
We call this best of breed, and really the idea there is to be able to pick and choose the best capabilities for your organization and actually use the best capabilities in a best of breed stack as opposed to buying these bundled solutions that have essentially ebbs and flows in performance, if that makes sense.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Speeding up workflows, maintaining compliance, reducing your IT footprint, which I spoke to a minute ago, and then being also able to facilitate collaboration on both regulated and non-regulated content from a single place. That’s kind of the value proposition here that we’re talking about, right?
Manu Vohra: Yeah, absolutely. We don’t think that you need 150 SaaS solutions to solve problems across the life sciences ecosystem. Putting both regulated and non-regulated content, it’s on the same platform, it’s not all in the same folder. We have capabilities to service all the different functions across the enterprise, but putting all of it on the same platform reduces the overall costs of the ecosystem and it makes it extremely simple for end users. And for us, the end user experience is very important. Whatever capabilities we try to release, we want it to be simple but powerful. And that extends to things like process automation. Doing things that would normally take five or six clicks, we want to make it one click. Sharing things within a workflow, we want to be able to automate it, so you and I work on the same team can automate our workflow versus traditionally we would need to go talk to IT, get a couple of admins on it, and create a workflow that’s going to basically outlive all of us because we’re too bothered to change anything.
Shelly Kramer: Right. I know that there are some key benefits for Box’s content cloud for life sciences. There are maybe just a handful of integrations and I know there’s a really robust set of APIs, but let’s have you speak to that if you would for me.
Manu Vohra: Sure, absolutely. Yeah, we have over 1500 active integrations today. This leads into our best of breed story.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely.
Manu Vohra: We have several capabilities, but if you are using a solution of choice, we’re happy to integrate into your ecosystem. We have over 1500 active integrations today that we run and maintain. We have a very busy business development team that’s working on that, including several engineers. But we also have a very robust set of APIs. In those scenarios where you don’t have an active integration to a tool you want to use, you can tap into our APIs and essentially build your own application. For example, we have customers who recently built a complaints application for receiving complaints around a device that they manufacture. They’re using Box to essentially absorb all the complaints that are coming in and to process those. There’s no fixed application for it that they had, so they essentially built one on top of Box.
Shelly Kramer: Very cool. That’s awesome. I love, in these conversations, I love hearing some customer success stories, so I’m hoping you came with some that you might be able to share with us. I’d love to hear some.
Manu Vohra: Sure. Sure. I got several.
Here’s a cool one. We have a customer who essentially runs global clinical trials, and you might have heard of this thing called an informed consent form. Anytime you go to the doctor’s office, or especially if you’re running through a clinical trial or taking some drugs, you might be familiar with this form that you have to sign off called an informed consent form.
Shelly Kramer: Yep.
Manu Vohra: To the people in the industry, that’s not just a form, it’s a heavily convoluted process. Normally, once you fill out that form, in the backend that has to go through, it has to touch about 40 to 50 different people in the end for several stages of approvals and go through different applications. And that normally ends up taking multiple months, if not weeks. Actually the overall process on where it ends up in an end-state repository is going outlast even in a year, but we have a customer essentially took that process and automated the entire thing on Box.
The advantage there is that at one end you can consume the content into Box, you can get the form in, but once you have that content, you can capture the rich metadata around that content as well. And then actually move it through the workflow, connecting to different approval cycles, to different applications, and also push it into an end-state repository if it’s not boxed. This process normally would’ve taken several months and we’re doing it literally in days now.
Shelly Kramer: Oh, wow. That’s awesome.
Manu Vohra: I mentioned the complaints application. We also have customers today doing things around pharmacovigilance. This is where you actually find some issues with the drug or some kind of safety concerns. Investigators who are, essentially doctors, working on clinical sites get involved to investigate what happened, who the patient was, and this is an adjudication process that spans multiple investigators. We’re deploying that process in Box as well, to essentially support actively processing those reviews across multiple healthcare professionals and adjudicators to run through the process, confirm who the patient was, confirm if the drug was actually administered at the right place at the right time, and then come to an eventual agreement and disposition of the case.
Again, this is another one of those acceleration stories where this general process would have taken a lot of phone calls, emails, and many times, even if you can believe it, faxes. Try to push a patient record through a phone call or to a fax, that’s impossible. But we’re essentially doing that in Box today and we are automating the entire thing as well. Another cool I have is through the pandemic. Oh, sorry, was that-
Shelly Kramer: No, no, I listened to that story and I think this is a lifesaving piece of functionality. You know what I’m saying? This is information that’s critical to have to keep more people safe and information that is absolutely vital. So to be able to shorten that span, that’s tremendously exciting.
Manu Vohra: Yeah. And just through the pandemic, we actually had the FDA and multiple healthcare authorities, even in the EMA and MHRA in the UK, we’re using Box to actually conduct inspections off the life sciences industry. In the life sciences, there’s several actors, there’s sponsors who are developing the drug, there’s CROs who are running the trials, and then there’s healthcare authorities and they all are auditing each other all the time. It’s just how we grew up.
Shelly Kramer: And you want that though, right?
Manu Vohra: You absolutely do. Absolutely. It’s a critical part of the industry to maintain the quality and efficacy of a drug. You want that.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely.
Manu Vohra: Absolutely to maintain safety data and efficacy and quality. But the processes previously were very manual. Normally getting inspected by a healthcare authority meant you drop everything you’re doing, you have an inspector that comes into your office, and you basically sit with them in the conference room and they will randomly ask you for things and documents and pieces of records that they want to see and you have to run around getting it and you kill a couple of trees in the process.
There was this concept of doing these inspections and audits virtually before the pandemic. It was an edge use case that basically became mainstream through the pandemic and now people don’t want to go back. This is one of the silver lining use cases. Even healthcare authorities now are seeing the light. They don’t want to fly all over the world inspecting people. If you can get the right content digitally, you can view it digitally, you can automate the process, you can have access stats to see who’s viewing what, and maintain the security and compliance controls around it, and a digital chain of custody, that’s ideal for both parties. That’s another process that we are supporting a lot of our customers with today as well.
Shelly Kramer: And not to mention the eco-friendly portion of people not getting on airplanes and flying to do physical inspections. It’s a win for all.
Manu Vohra: Absolutely.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. We have worked with Box and done a short research brief on this topic that I will be sure and include in the show notes for today’s conversation. I will also include a link to Box’s site where you can find some more information on their life science solutions, and I will include a link to my friend Manu’s LinkedIn profile. But with that, I think our conversation is a wrap. And Manu Vohra, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I love hearing what you and the team at Box are doing in the life sciences industry, and I think the solutions that you’ve developed are really very exciting.
Manu Vohra: Thanks Shelly. Thanks for having me.
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
