The People Behind the Products: Ian Lloyd

I've worked on Pharmaprojects since 1987 and was in an editorial capacity prior to my becoming senior director for the database in the mid-noughties. A few years ago, I was seconded onto the Fusion project, which is a platform to merge all of our editorial systems now that we're all part of Norstella. Now everything is collected once, authored once, and then published in different forms to the different products.

Previously, we had Pharmaprojects being authored on one database by one team, and Evaluate [Citeline’s sister company] information being authored on a different platform by another team.
And Biomedtracker being authored on another platform by another team, and they're all doing effectively the same thing.

I was asked to become the product owner for the drugs part of that project. In October 2024 we were able to launch the Fusion Drugs Workbench. So now there is one consolidated database of drugs. There is one team collecting all of the information, using what is known as DAF, or the data acquisition framework. In this new drug platform we merged the drug profiles for the same drugs from all the different databases into one place. You cannot begin to imagine how horrendously complicated that was and continues to be.

The goal was to have a have a single profile, for example, for one particular drug. But the complication was that each of the products were using different classification systems, different ontologies that had to be merged. Things did not match one to one to one by any stretch of imagination. You know, there are different rules for different conventions and different scope.

We've basically moved away from having people working on products to having people working on domains. So there are people who are drug experts, there are people who are trial experts. And there are people who are organization experts. What I've been doing since the Drugs Workbench went live has been to consolidate the data, make it a single source of truth, make it more efficient for the team, and make it more sensible.

Since October, I’ve been working on developing new types of content and working with the product team to deliver new features as I’ve moved into a new role as part of the Content Strategy team with a different focus and a different remit, which is kind of exciting and a little bit scary.

But the good news is it's been evolving and it still is evolving. I'm still working on Citeline’s Pharma R&D Review. I'm actually going to probably look more broadly at thought leadership as well. There's all sorts of cool things we can do. So it's quite exciting, this new role.

Data science is being used a lot in data acquisition. So now when the system scrapes a press release off Pfizer's website, for example, AI will identify the drug they're talking about or the company and set up a task in Fusion to update that drug with this press release. Rather than a person just looking at the press releases and see, saying, ‘Oh I need to update PF1234 and PF25678.’ The system actually does that for you. So that's pretty clever.

We just started to look at using AI to do little summaries on the front end of the actual products. It can go through a whole article and summarize it in, say,  six bullet points.

In Pharmaprojects, drug profiles can be very lengthy, and they have very long textual sections that are not very readable. I could definitely see a use case for just wanting to see the top six bullet points about this drug, who's developing it, what's this mechanism, what's its commercial landscape. If you're busy, you know that's super cool, right?

I've been doing it since 1993. Originally we just used to have a little monthly newsletter with Pharmaprojects called the Executive Briefing. And one year I thought, well, why don't I just do like a summary of the whole database. Then it was like, I don't know, 4 to 6 pages long. It was literally just here are the top companies, here are the top therapeutic activities, here are the top diseases or mechanisms and that was it. And people seemed to really like it.

Over the years it's just grown and grown and grown and it became its own thing, probably in the ‘90s. Now it’s in its 34th edition. Every year I try to add something that hadn't been done before, so it's not a complete retread. This year we've got a whole bunch of new analyses on the top 10 pharma companies, which are on the Pharmaprojects⁺ product.

For the past 15 years or so, I’ve chosen a theme for the report. I think the early themes I picked were things I knew something about, such as music and astronomy. I hope the themes make it more interesting for people to read because it just makes it more lively and fun.

I have to say, it's getting harder and harder to pick a theme. This year’s theme? I don't think it's a state secret. It’s around agriculture, gardening, basically growing stuff. A theme must be something I've not done before, something I maybe know a bit about, and something where there are lots of idioms that I can work into to the narrative. I think that that would be the three main criteria that I would use to pick the themes.

That's a good question. So again, that's in a process of evolution. I would say when I was just doing Pharmaprojects, it was answering analyst inquiries. Making sure the data was correct, working with the team, updating and just making sure that the drug profiles were correct.

That kind of all went out the window when Fusion became a full-time job for a couple of years. That involved drawing what screens should look like for the database, working with the tech team. We still have a daily call with the drug tech team There was a period leading up to the October 2024 launch where I was pretty much on calls all day, every day. Now we have daily calls. We have weekly calls on various subjects. You know, I spend a lot of time on calls. I'm sure everybody does.

And there was also a period where it felt like every morning you'd solve one problem and then during the day six more problems would appear.

In the past year it's been a mixture between continuing to work on Fusion and working with the Drugs Workbench. The focus has been on coming up with policy that can be applied Norstella-wide, such as  content strategy. We're now coming up single rules. In terms of authoring the way you extract data and the way you edit, add it onto the database, there's got to be just one way of doing it.

So how that goes is normally I write the Pharma R&D report through January and then the NAS [New Active Substances] report. The NAS list always takes a bit of research to get the definitive list. So then I'll do that, then I'll write the NAS report and then I'll do the slides for the Pharma R&D Review webinar, and then usually at the end of Q1 we do the webinar. So that's going to be my kind of life still I think in even in my new role for this year.

I do like doing the Pharma R&D report. It's always a bit daunting on the second of January when you have to start from scratch again because last year’s was a 70-page Word document. It's like. ‘Oh my goodness,’ but I feel like I soon get into the flow.

I do enjoy writing very much and coming up with interesting ways to use the theme. It's very rewarding. I like to analyze the data as well. I find the trends in pharma R&D interesting. I think I'm very lucky in that I got a biochemistry degree originally, so I was always interested in science and drug development. I started working on Pharmaprojects when I was 23, and I'm still really interested in  drugs and how they work, new therapies, something that affects us all. I've had a lifelong interest in the subject matter, which I think is a really important thing if you're going to work in this area.

I read articles and blogs related to drug development just because I'm interested in it. I'm sure there are lots of people in the world who have jobs that don't really interest them at all, and so I feel I've been very fortunate that I've had something I'm still interested in after all this while.

I come from the pre-IT age, if you like. There were no computers in my school. I've had to work with developers on the Fusion project, for example, who are proper tech people. They speak a completely different language from me. So that's been a real challenge for me.

The product owners were there to make sure we delivered what was needed, though the tech team was doing the coding in the background. In between we had a business analyst who's basically there to interpret my requirements into language the tech team can understand. My kind of waffling about ‘Oh, it needs to do this and this’ and converting that into stories for the tech team to go and actually do the coding.

When we were talking about the enterprise data model, something completely not in my wheelhouse, there were times I was like, ‘Why am I doing this? I don't understand any of this stuff at all.’ But you adapt, you learn, people help you. I would say the start of the Fusion project was the most challenging period of my whole career, but we did it. So it's kind of also been the most rewarding.

We’re still adding new enhancements to Fusion. Also there’s a lot of blending the data. I'm also working on tidying up this data, cleansing it, and that will be ongoing. When Fusion went live, the company profiles went live first, then drugs went live. But then last year there were developments to add in the trials part and events and all these things have to integrate. You can't have the Drugs Workbench saying something different from the trials workbench, which says something different from the events. Everything has to talk to each other and line up.

We're currently working behind the scenes to make sure there is no contradictory data. I think ‘referential integrity’ is the buzzword for that.

The big thing that's emerged in the last few years has been obesity, which has just gone insane. The number of new drugs for obesity is going up, up, up. I don't know whether the bubble will burst at some point. The US just approved an oral version. So that to me sounds like that market is just only going to get bigger and bigger, right? I mean, there must be lots of people who don't fancy injecting themselves every day but would happily pop a pill. So that seems to be still going crazy.

At the moment, and this is more in the NAS report than the than the R&D report, the big thing is China. Around 2010, there were almost no novel pipeline drugs coming out of China. It was all copies. It was just all Chinese traditional medicines. And then the Chinese government wanted to grow its pharma industry and invested heavily in it. China is now the second biggest country for development. China has actually overtaken the US in terms of new drug launches, which I did not expect to happen yet. That's going to be the big news this year. I reckoned that China might overtake the US as the biggest country for debutant drugs by the end of the decade, but it's happened already, which to me is quite extraordinary. To go from nothing to actually, in terms of new drug introductions, being the world leader in 15 to 20 years. It's phenomenal. I think China is unstoppable, to be honest.

A lot of these drugs developed in China are going to be marketed in China, maybe not internationally, but as it inevitably spreads out more and more and more, it's going to really threaten other markets.

I play badminton twice a week to a reasonable level, you know, not just kind of patting around. I've played quite competitively, in tournaments, et cetera.

And the other thing I do, which I think maybe people are a bit surprised about, is I used to DJ a lot and I still do a bit. And I do one or two mixes a month as like podcasts, which I put on SoundCloud and YouTube and iTunes, et cetera.

I still, even though I'm in my 60s, like to go out, clubbing occasionally and go to festivals. I'm really into the music. I spend a lot of time listening to other people's mixes and picking the right tracks and curating the tracks, getting them in the right order.

I have this kind of expensive kit for making mixes on. It’s something that's so different from my day job, so it's a real release, you know?