Christian Olsen, VP of Strategy for Protein Therapeutics at Dotmatics, is featured in Pharmaceutical Executive with a new article examining why so many R&D software platforms fail complex biologics programs — and what it will take to fix it.
In the piece, Olsen compares biologics R&D to adjusting a camera lens: discovery calls for a wide aperture to capture as many possibilities as possible, while lead optimization, CMC, and scale-up require progressively narrowing the focus and locking in what's been learned. The trouble, he argues, is that most platforms are built to excel at just one of these modes — open-ended search, side-by-side comparison, audit trails, or process handoff — and get stretched to cover the rest. For complex modalities like multispecific antibodies and antibody drug conjugates, where multiple design paths, formats, and payload decisions intersect, this mismatch means scientific judgment often doesn't survive the handoff between stages. The result: redundant experiments, lost context, and reasoning that has to be reconstructed from memory, emails, or old meeting notes.
Olsen's conclusion: the organizations that lead the next decade of biologics development won't be the ones with the most data — they'll be the ones with an architecture where scientific judgment and context travel with the data itself, at every stage.
Read the full article on Pharmaceutical Executive: The Experiment Worked, The Knowledge Didn't Survive It