CIO Bulletin

Captario — modernizing pharma decision-making through digitalization

Having experienced one of the biggest health crises the modern world has witnessed, it has become alarmingly apparent that continuous innovation in pharmaceutical drug development is essential. New drugs are essential for many reasons, such as new diseases, our increasing understanding of health conditions allowing treatment of previously untreatable conditions, and the development of drug resistance.

Whatever the reason, drug development’s ultimate goal is to bring a new compound with a proven therapeutic effect to the market.

But the drug development process is tedious and fraught with many dangers and potential risks. Captario enables drug development and commercialization organizations to make better strategic decisions through its innovative cloud-based simulation software, Captario SUM^® (Strategic Uncertainty Management).

Captario’s story and its brand values

It was back in 2009 that the first initial idea of a tailored, holistic pharma decision-making tool came to life. A group of individuals working at some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies saw that the way they were currently conducting forecasting analyses and extracting data from their drug development processes was not optimal. To make drug development more efficient and effective, they believed you must integrate business functions, consider the full end-to-end product life cycle, assess from both a project and a portfolio perspective accounting for interdependencies, and understand the impact of uncertainty at every major decision point. This group realized that there had to be a better solution. When they couldn’t find one, they set out to build the one—Captario SUM.

In 2012, Captario was founded as a registered company, with its first office in the basement of one of the founders. The goal was clear—transform pharma decision-making.

With over 200 combined years of professional experience in the pharmaceutical space, the Captario team is committed to three core values: Passion, Product, and Principles.

Passion:

Captario is committed to making a positive impact on a global scale. The team is curious about the unknown, they dare to be pioneers, and they take action to provide game-changing contributions.

Product:

Captario strives to modernize decision-making through innovative software. As such, the team is constantly looking to improve its performance. Captario works collaboratively with customers to continually improve and expand products with best-in-class service.

Principles:

Captario is committed to collaboration internally, with customers, and with partners. The team acts with integrity and transparency. Each “Captarian” cares about one another and consistently operates with these principles at their core.

Innovation at Captario—Captario SUM’s industry-wide disruption

While pharma is moving towards novel approaches for curing or treating disease, studies show that the industry remains exceptionally inert, lacking innovation in business operations that keep pace with the market’s unmet and underserved medical needs. Today, it takes 10 years to bring a drug from discovery to market with 90% of clinical drug development actually failing before even getting there. Worse, yet, is that it costs an average of $1.3 billion along the way.

Captario SUM is an all-in-one modeling, simulating, and visualizing tool for decision-making in drug development. Captario’s strategy is to leverage modern technology and theory to look granularly at high-risk multimillion-dollar decisions from clinical through commercialization.

There are three primary ways that Captario SUM is doing things differently to disrupt drug development decision-making:

A. Connecting clinical to commercial:By building end-to-end BPMN models, Captario SUM provides users with one data source across all company departments. With real-time updates accessible company-wide, this system enables teams to quickly respond to changing circumstances eliminating the inefficacy of intra-company lag time. Furthermore, with full traceability of historical data, users will always have a record of course changes.

B. Taking uncertainty into account:By using ranges instead of point estimates, Captario SUM enables users to consider uncertainty when making decisions. As one of Captario’s clients explained,

“if you only use one number, the only thing you can be for certain is that you are wrong.”

C. Providing real-time scenario analysis: With SUM’s unique sandbox environment, clients can run countless what-if scenario simulations without negatively affecting their baseline environment. When a better competitive outcome is identified, a new baseline is created, optimizing the pharma strategy and ultimately helping individuals move from a static view of their projects and portfolios to a more realistic, dynamic perspective.

Nowadays, the pharma/biotech industry continues to utilize rudimentary tools, like Excel, that are not scalable, not dynamic, and cannot handle complex scenarios. Captario needed to develop their cloud-based solution to enable pharmaceutical organizations to make better strategic decisions with flexibility and real-time functionality.

Goals for the future

Captario is a holistic and dynamic SaaS tool with R&D to commercial modeling capabilities for product value, portfolio optimization, and first-to-market strategy. Instead of theoretical planning, analysis is based on Monte Carlo simulations and BPMN modeling, providing only viable outcomes for product forecasting.

Captario’s goal is to improve global health by getting more drugs to market quicker for the patients who need them. If done efficiently, including cost-conscientiously, they are hopefully more accessible from a cost perspective. It is Captario’s goal to reshape how the industry makes decisions to mitigate those hurdles, ultimately serving the patients better.

Transforming decision-making in the pharmaceutical industry

Johannes Vänngård is the CEO and Co-Founder of Captario. Johannes Vänngård is an engineer and entrepreneur and has been part of founding several innovative tech companies in different industries. Over the years, Vänngård has taken special interest in the decision-making process and spent five years as an independent consultant helping to improve big pharma decision-making.