The future of modeling and simulation as the engine for strategic decision-making in pharma development, economics, and therapeutics: an interactive discussion

March 16, 2019

Workshop and discussion presented at ASCPT 2019 by Marc Gastonguay, Ph.D, and Jonathan French, Sc.D.

Attendees participated in an interactive discussion exploring a vision for the future of modeling and simulation as the engine for decision-making in pharma development, economics, and therapeutics.

From examples published in the literature and presented at professional conferences, it appears that the discipline of pharmacometrics has been quite successful at impacting drug development decision-making. It’s true that significant progress has been made in bringing quantitative approaches to some decisions, but the reality is that most of the impact has been marginalized to a small subset of decision-making topics, typically focused on clinical pharmacology questions. Unlike other modern industries, strategic decision-making in pharma still lacks an integrated, formal, quantitative basis.

At this workshop, we explored the decision-making process in our industry. This begins with a review of the status quo, recognizing habits, biases, constraints, and common trends. Hurdles, challenges, and opportunities for improvement will be identified. From there, we were able to explore solutions and assemble a vision for an integrated quantitative decision informatics platform in pharma.