SMARTER STRATEGIES

Drug Research Takes an Animated Position

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 06-03-10 | Comments

Why resort to travel and tedium in the peer-review process when you can let your own walking, talking avatar get the job done?

If you�ve never been to what�s commonly called a �poster� session for the pharmaceutical industry, well, you haven�t exactly missed out on an exercise in non-stop excitement.

A poster session/presentation is a rather meticulous but necessary step along the way toward getting pharmaceutical research reviewed and approved, often via the academic/professional peer approach, which can take several hours. With approval, the research typically paves the way for authorization of new drugs or new usages of existing drugs.

Still with us?

That�s good. Because a Philadelphia-based virtual-collaboration company called ProtonMedia is livening up the process of pharmaceutical poster sessions. It recently launched a 3-hour poster session via its 3D collaboration tool, ProtoSphere, for what it claims to be the drug industry�s first virtual scientific poster session. All told, there were 20 posters, eight presenters and 46 attendees from various locations logging on from their own computers.

For each participant, the screen displayed an animated avatar designed to match his/her physical features. The avatars allowed the participating scientists to interact, make hand gestures, chit-chat and mill about the cyber-room as they discussed and exchanged ideas about the wealth of research being presented. If they needed to make a private comment to a participant, they could do so via VOIP or texting. After the poster exercise was complete, all the avatars got together for some virtual beer pong, and a good day was had by all.

OK, we�re kidding about the last bit. Actually, after the virtual poster session ended, the ProtoSphere environment remained available for ongoing access, discussions, meetings and collaboration�something that�s simply not possible in a real-world conference.

ProtonMedia has launched similar efforts for AstraZeneca, Chevron, BP and Boeing. In BP�s case, the company developed a scenario-based teaming project in ProtoSphere, called the Global Graduate Challenge. This project replaced its annual Global Graduate Forum, a three-day conference usually held in London to mark the culmination of its graduate-induction program.

The monthlong Global Graduate Challenge divided graduates into 15 teams representing BP�s future leadership. Graduates were presented with a dilemma: Decide whether to tap a protected territory�s energy resources.

ProtoSphere creates a virtual conference environment.

The virtual environment contained 51 �rooms,� including briefing rooms, conference rooms and 35 team rooms. Each briefing room held 24 people and had a flat-screen TV to view videos created for the challenge; a Wikipedia document describing the fictitious territory; a schedule of subject-matter expert (SME) sessions; and an intelligent bot to play back audio recordings to the graduates.

At the end of the challenge, graduates said the project was �a significant learning experience,� and that they felt more confident in approaching and collaborating with their superiors in the virtual environment, as opposed to in the real world. BP found the virtual event saved the company $3.7 million in travel, accommodations and other costs, compared with producing a physical event.

�When people compared it with Web conferencing and other online events and technologies they�d had, the graduate challenge came out with a positive response across the scale,� says Joe Little, a senior consultant for the Chief Technology Office at BP.