Outcomes
About Psivant Therapeutics
Psivant Therapeutics is advancing a paradigm shift in biotechnology by pioneering a physics-driven approach to drug design that is tightly coupled to chemistry and biology research and development. Their QUAISAR platform is purpose-built to develop novel small molecule therapeutics to address biologically and genetically validated, but previously intractable, protein targets.
Challenges
Like many drug discovery startups, Psivant works with multiple CROs that each guide the team through different processes they’re experts in. Although diversifying their pool of external consultants and CROs lets Psivant unlock vertical expertise without relying on just one partner, managing these external relationships was quickly causing time and capital inefficiencies.
Psivant was using emails and SharePoint to communicate with CROs on a once-weekly basis, a long feedback loop which ultimately slowed team output significantly over the course of a program. Important information was regularly buried in long email threads.
A Psivant team member had to manually input experimental data from CROs into their internal data. Before Kaleidoscope, Psivant’s chemistry CRO sent a weekly email with an Excel file listing the molecules delivered and a PowerPoint presentation with chemistry information. During each Project Team Meeting, Psivant’s chemistry lead had to review these emails, collect the information in them – like how many molecules are shipped, how many are in synthesis, and how many are queued – and relay that to the team. “It was very manual work and it took a lot of time.”
Without access to real-time information, Psivant’s team couldn’t make quick, informed decisions on what compounds to prioritize and deprioritize during their program meetings. Not having these insights meant the team lagged in their ability to allocate capital efficiency – they could be triggering dead-end molecules that drained resources for weeks.
Solutions
Head of Data Science and ML, Shivam Patel, wanted to introduce better ways of managing the gaps in CRO communication when he came across Kaleidoscope. His team loved how easy it was to use and it instantly became Psivant’s go-to platform for 2 core workflows: reviewing the status of each compound in a design cycle and collaborating with CRO partners.
Psivant now uses Kaleidoscope’s dashboards to drive team discussions. The design team can review compounds in the most recent design cycle asynchronously, leaving thoughts. Then during a design meeting, the team can open Kaleidoscope’s kanban dashboard and go through each molecule one-by-one, sorting them by votes until a consensus is reached on which compounds to synthesize.
Once Psivant’s team selects compounds, they trigger an experiment, which automatically sends CROs all the relevant data they need to start working. Because they have all of their data in one platform, Psivant can securely invite CROs to Kaleidoscope and segment down which data to share with each external partner.
The team considered building an internal tool for aspects of what they needed, but they’re glad they didn’t. By their estimates, “it would have cost at least $60,000 for a full stack developer and taken 3 months just to build an initial version, plus all the ongoing engineering work to improve and maintain the service.”
On top of that, the security requirements made building infeasible. “It’s a lot of proprietary information. If we built an internal tool, it would be for us to manually input and manage all that information. Kaleidoscope solves that because external users don't need to be on our system, no VPN is required – and there's a permission management system.”
Shivam wanted Psivant to be in control of their workflow and collaboration tool rather than relying on any given CRO to force adoption of their system. This would require way too much internal training and leave them dependent on the CRO. His hypothesis was right. Kaleidoscope brings every stakeholder under one roof so scientists across Psivant’s network of CRO partners can input live data and feedback directly into Kaleidoscope while they work. This way, Shivam and his team are always up-to-date on the state of each molecule being worked on and whether there are any blockers along the way.
For Shivam, being able to track live data across CROs is a huge value add in active discussions he has with the team. Knowing the status of the compounds in the queue makes it easy to make quick, informed judgment calls and change priorities in real-time. As a startup trying to optimize capital, having this visibility into the synthesis queue saves months every year – and as a result a lot of money – avoiding dead ends.
If you were able to reprioritize, you could’ve gotten molecules within 4 weeks. Imagine that happening 4 or 5 times a year. You start saving a lot of time. You’ll save up to 2 months a year if you correctly manage the synthesis queue.
CSO and Co-founder
Chief of Staff
Co-founder, VP Operations
Head of Data Science & ML
Co-founder and CTO
Platform Tx company with multi-asset pipeline
Early stage small molecule therapeutics company