Kaleidoscope

How Forward Therapeutics runs focused, data-driven meetings on Kaleidoscope dashboards

Case study

Ewan Taylor

CSO, Co-founder

Science

Small molecule, immunology, inflammation

Website

forward-tx.com

Outcomes

1+ days saved per week

The Forward team organizes key data for easy review on Kaleidoscope, saving the discovery team significant time they previously spent preparing summary slides.

Data organized for decisions

The discovery team can now make fast, better-informed decisions when comparing lead compounds based on live views of the latest data.

Transparent data sharing

Forward can easily share data with research collaborators in an impressive, richer format without additional work to curate data and manage permissions.

About Forward Therapeutics

Forward Therapeutics is an immunology discovery company focused on making next generation therapies for a broad range of inflammatory and degenerative diseases.

After an exciting Series A announced in the fall of 2023, Forward is well capitalized but intentionally remains lean. A core leadership team operates as the braintrust leading a distributed, international campaign made possible by a brilliant team of consultants, CROs, and academic collaborators.

Challenges

Development decisions require summarized data

Like many biotechs, Forward had a system of record for capturing and storing the data they generated week by week – mountains of it. But when the leadership team meets for weekly reviews, they ultimately need that data clearly summarized and digestible. Traditional teams share and discuss project data via PowerPoint slides, chemistry tools, or raw data files. The team knew that, to stay nimble and reach their ambitious goals, they had to swap out presentations for something new. Kaleidoscope presented a new way to plan, execute, and share project data.

Solutions

With their company name and logo of a flying swift, Forward is focused on making the best decisions at the right time. Co-founder and CSO Ewan Taylor looked into better tools to organize and review data and saw immediate ROI when implementing Kaleidoscope. It instantly began saving them time they’d otherwise be putting into stale powerpoint slides, and unlocks a clear data strategy leading towards pipeline progression.

“Kaleidoscope takes all the steps out of the discovery process and enables us to have one place to upload all the diverse datasets for our lead assets, compare them with competitor compounds, and have fluid, focused discussion.”

Ewan Taylor, CSO and Co-founder

Development decisions require summarized data

Forward now uses a Kaleidoscope dashboard to drive the discovery team’s weekly meetings, reviewing lead compounds pitted head-to-head across key categories.

“Kaleidoscope allows the discovery team to make faster and better-informed decisions because they have all the data at their fingertips.”

Taking action on “white space”

Forward identifies next steps by reviewing the empty cells on the dashboard, and prioritizing what information the team needs next. Capturing live actions on the lead compounds allows for efficient operations.

Replacing static slides with dynamic data

Gone are the days of ‘let me find the data in Sharepoint.’ Live dashboards make discussion seamless – click from a plot directly to its source experiment, and open the full report. The ability to jump to key data sets and evaluate them in a live environment has made discussions more fluid and decision-making faster.

“Now our discovery meetings are more about analysis and decisions than retrieving data.”

Enabling mission critical collaborations

As a small core team that leverages partnerships to move mountains, Forward can use Kaleidoscope as a collaboration hub. Their dashboard presents progress to research collaborators in a transparent format that’s visibly easy to work with. CRO datasets are integrated seamlessly with their ever growing database, and Forward can securely invite scientists at CROs to input data directly into Kaleidoscope while they work.

“When we’re sharing the data with collaborators - consultants, academic partners, or even pharma partners – it allows us to be transparent with our data sharing, but also tailor what we share with each different partner.”

“Kaleidoscope allows the discovery team to make faster and better-informed decisions because they have all the data at their fingertips.”

Ewan Taylor
CSO and Co-founder

“Kaleidoscope provides the ability to align our key partners, and effectively manage our growing portfolio of IP. It saves us 10 or more hours per week.”

Marina Crowe
Chief of Staff

“We needed a better system for tracking our R&D data and progress — Kaleidoscope enables more efficient decision making and communication to key stakeholders.”

Geraldine Paulus
Co-founder, VP Operations

“Kaleidoscope expertly streamlines our data sharing with CROs, making sure Psivant remains in perfect harmony.”

Shivam Patel
Head of Data Science & ML

“Powerful, intuitive, well-designed ... lets biotechs spend resources on their actual IP: the assets and biology.”

Brian Naughton
Co-founder and CTO

“We realized that sharing our data in Kaleidoscope was really attractive to Pharma partners – it showed clarity of progress and that we have clean and organized data to work with.”

SVP Business Development
Platform Tx company with multi-asset pipeline

“Prior to Kaleidoscope it would take me 4-5 steps per workflow to do what I can now achieve in one step. I’m also able to spend 3x less time each week searching for, collating, and navigating data.”

Director of Preclinical Operations
Early stage small molecule therapeutics company