Confo Therapeutics identifies scientific experts seamlessly using AcademicLabs.

Comprehensive case study

Introduction

Confo Therapeutics identifies scientific experts seamlessly using AcademicLabs, eliminating a time sink in their drug discovery pipeline and allowing their work to move forward with newfound confidence.

Meet Confo Therapeutics

Confo Therapeutics is a Belgian biotech company leading the way for GPCR (G protein-coupled receptors) modulating therapies. Their technology platform is used to build a multi-indication pipeline of drug candidates of agonists as well as antagonists to previously inaccessible GPCR targets.

Stephanie Staelens is the project manager responsible for all drug discovery projects until hit finding. She explores new drug targets and determines whether there are any opportunities for further exploration for drug discovery. She explains that “the easy targets are gone,” so they’re, “focused on opportunities where their platform can make the difference”. She consults with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) for their expertise on potential hits and to determine if she’s on the right track.

When A PubMed Search Just Doesn’t Cut It: The Challenges

• Information about KOLs and scientific experts is distributed across the internet. Multiple data sources meant there was no 360° view of expertise, current activities, and existing collaboration networks.

• Manually counting authors in the literature to identify KOLs was very time-consuming and resulted in Stephanie gaining only a partial view of the research landscape. When the data was unorganized, it was difficult to zoom out to discover trends and insights.

• Drawing the full picture of the research landscape for a specific drug target took days of tedious searching. The data subsequently had to be validated and cross-checked due to incomplete and out-of-date sources and websites.

All of the Information Under One Roof: The Solution

• A user-friendly interface for exploring, filtering, and analyzing the latest information under one roof allows Confo Therapeutics to precisely zero in on its target and reach the relevant experts in no time.

• Cutting time from the exploration stage frees up bandwidth to go deeper in her search.

• Confidence in her results enables her to proceed in presenting her proposed drug targets to the executive committee.

Easy to Use

Once introduced to AcademicLabs, Stephanie had a chance to play around with the platform. As soon as she understood what information was available, she decided it fit the bill and she could eliminate the use of multiple silo databases that each provide only a piece of the puzzle.

Stephanie remembers, “AcademicLabs was introduced by Christel Menet, our Chief Scientific Officer, to identify knowledge gaps and collaborators. But the platform became more than that to me, it is a central entry point to find anything, from patents to literature, researchers, clinical trials, funded projects, and startups.” The information she needed was captured in AcademicLabs, the x-factor was its user-friendliness.

“The other platforms we tried were too difficult to use. We would have needed huge periods of training and trial and error to find our way.”

She liked how she could intuitively navigate the information. “I can easily navigate to where I want to end up, and it’s easy to always know where I am. In other databases—typically, this is not done well—I easily get lost and don’t know where I am with my searches and links.” If she couldn’t find her way or a specific result, she found support was readily available and quick to respond to her specific case.

Quickly Connecting the Dots

AcademicLabs has changed her workflow and importantly, the speed and confidence at which she can move.
Stephanie is using AcademicLabs every week as a shortcut to the desired information, allowing her work to move faster.

Now, she can explore targets more effectively, go deeper in her search for KOLs, and accelerate the initiation procedure of discovery projects with confidence.

Finding the Right Experts

“I no longer need to read the first, like 50 publications to understand and track who the most frequent authors are and google the groups they belong to,” she explains. “This alone saves a lot of time, enabling me to go deeper and conduct more targeted searches than if I searched PubMed.

By just using the different tools AcademicLabs has to query topics, I can gain an understanding of who’s doing what and what they’ve published. Before, I didn’t have a full picture of the research landscape.”

Landscaping to Find Potential Drug Targets

In addition to finding KOLs, Stephanie needs to stay on top of what’s happening across the GPCR research landscape as a whole.

She views the research landscape broadly to understand if a target is well validated towards a disease. With the use of handy filters, she can quickly scan and keep track of her searches. Once a potential target has been identified, she can pinpoint an expert from their recent publications, location, and seniority. She then connects the dots to find patents, funding, clinical trials, and their existing collaborations with companies or institutions.

“With the new addition of finding biotech companies, I just created an alert for startups and spinoffs, not specific to any targets but GPCR as a very broad query—just to see what is coming and for general awareness.”

Proceeding with Confidence

When proposing new targets to their executive committee, her team has to feel confident that they’ve covered all of their bases when presenting an accurate picture of the drug target landscape.

To ensure she is not missing anything, she talks to the key players to quickly uncover the latest advances in biological knowledge, clinical developments, and technological approaches related to the target or indication of interest—information only revealed by talking to an expert and picking their brain."

“Very often when we contact people, we see that they are indeed a world leader. We are well prepared and spot-on when finding the experts we need to answer our questions.”

Stephanie admits she sometimes still checks the literature on PubMed after an AcademicLabs search to make sure she hasn’t missed anything—old habits die hard.

“I do go to PubMed to feel comfortable again, to ensure I haven’t missed anything.” Upon circling back to her old method, she finds she is capturing the same information, and more, but a lot quicker.

With regards to validating if the scientists she’s reaching out to from her AcademicLabs searches are of the same quality as before, she says they have been on target concerning their level of expertise and the quality of information extracted.

Stephanie jokes, “I can’t say we would not have found these people by scanning publications as I can’t split myself in two to run such an experiment.” In saying this, she explains that her time is limited in her search, “I think we have found key experts that we otherwise would not have come across. We can’t spend four days finding the key opinion leader—you simply would not do that. Without AcademicLabs, the expert search is more superficial.”