Event: INTERPHEX 2010

With research and development costs rising and discovery pipelines struggling, life sciences organizations are always looking for opportunities to increase revenue, while reducing overall costs, improving operational efficiencies and minimizing risks.

The recent conference, INTERPHEX Japan 2010, Asia’s largest pharmaceutical event, at Japan’s biggest exhibition center, Tokyo Big Sight, therefore provided an excellent opportunity for life sciences professionals to network for three days to source products, services and capabilities that drive scientific and process innovation for the life sciences industry. In its 23rd year, and organised by Reed Exhibitions, INTERPHEX Japan proved a huge success, attracting a record number of 1,564 exhibitors and 66,750 industry professionals from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, cosmetics R&D and manufacturing industries.

Tokyo Big Sight

IntraLinks was there to showcase its solutions and present live demonstrations in the Pharma IT Solutions Zone, specifically its Safety Document Exchange solution for the life sciences industry, a scalable solution for safety teams that manage reporting for Serious Adverse Events (SAEs) around the world. The solution is a single, secure location for all internal and external parties around the globe to easily access and exchange up-to-the-minute information. Documents can be accessed 24/7/365 from any computer via any standard web browser and weeks or months can be shaved off a project, which translates into thousands, even millions of dollars of cost savings.

INTERPHEX was a great opportunity for IntraLinks to meet with existing clients and also interact with other key professionals in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry to understand how they exchange critical information. A good proportion revealed that they still used traditional methods such as overnight mail, email and fax to exchange documents, methods that are not only costly but, more importantly, lack security and auditability. There was significant interest in IntraLinks' Life Sciences solution and the experience of IntraLinks’ clients, customers that have befitted from greater control of critical business processes whilst accelerating time-to-market and reducing operational costs.

When I asked Mr. Takashi Yamamoto, Head of Strategic Sales, IntraLinks Japan for his thoughts on the event he observed — “This year’s INTERPHEX conference was a great event and a success for IntraLinks. Not only did Mr. Ikeda, General Manager, IT Strategy Department of Daiichi Sankyo, cite the benefits of IntraLinks’ life sciences solution in his keynote speech but we also received a lot of interest from pharmaceutical companies wishing to implement our technology to move their critical information to the cloud. I enjoyed meeting our valued clients and I am pleased to have formed so many new business relationships too.”

IntraLinks solutions are used by the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies and the top 10 biotechs in the world. Both our investment and presence is growing rapidly in Japan as companies clamor to retain competitive edge by introducing new working practices based around IntraLinks service and technology.

Companies demonstrating foresight and adopting IntraLinks this year include Daiichi Sankyo, a global pharma innovator, now utilizing IntraLinks as the company’s information sharing and collaboration solution and M’s Science, a drug discovery bio venture, selecting IntraLinks to improve the efficiency of their business development and licensing activity.

Thanks to the introductions made at INTERPHEX, we look forward to working with even more life sciences companies in Japan to help them safeguard critical information and streamline their operations.