More New Biologics CMOs on CMOLocator!

At Kymanox, we're quite excited about all of the Contract Manufacturing Organizations that are joining our Biologics CMO Search Engine.

Here's a list of the most recently added partners:

AAIPharma Services Corp.

Althea Technologies, Inc

Avecia

Cytovance Biologics, LLC.

Enzon Pharmaceuticals

Eurogentec Biologics

Formatech, Inc.

Goodwin Biotechnology, Inc.

Hyaluron Contract Manufacturing (HCM)

Miltenyi Bioprocess

Novozymes

PacificGMP

Paragon Bioservices, Inc.

Pyramid Laboratories, Inc.

Vivante GMP Solutions, Inc.

Marketing our Kymanox Training

Kymanox will be presenting four two-day courses in the next couple of months, and I've undertaken an marketing campaign to help promote it. If you received our email, or saw our online ads, we hope you will be able to attend!

We are very excited about the opportunity to share our wealth of knowledge of both Technology Transfer and Project Management in the Biopharmaceutical Industry. The courses will be presented at BTEC (Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center), at North Carolina State University.

"Project Management in Drug Development: Phase III to Commercialization and Beyond" will be presented on June 8-9, 2009, and July 13-14, 2009 at Room 123 of BTEC. It will focus on how to discover the right cross-functional team to ensure project success. Other items will include how to effectively communicate with internal and external stakeholders and how to prevent communication breakdowns. This course will be presented by Stephen M. Perry.

"Universal Technology Transfer Methodologies for Biopharmaceuticals" will be presented on June 15-16, 2009 and July 27-28, 2009 and will focus on how to setup a team of professionals to ensure a successful technology transfer. It will show you how to assess the feasibility, business, and regulatory impact, and how to identify necessary actions and create detailed assay and process transfer plans for your project. This course will be presented by both Stephen M. Perry and Vladimir Kostyukovsky.

While developing a marketing plan for these classes, I decided that the best course of action was to market to our large network of friends and colleagues. While a direct mail or print advertisement would have been a fantastic addition, both of these types of marketing require more lead time, are higher cost, and are not very easily tracked with respect to the leads and final outcomes they provide. In this day and age, social marketing is becoming more and more applicable. We chose a marketing plan which involved sending emails to our close friends and collegues, and also an online advertising campaign which targeted keywords and location, as well as specific websites that would have the type of membership that would be interested in our classes. I will post the results of our campaign in a few weeks when it is complete.

If you have any comments or suggestions, I'm open to feedback. Just contact me at the email listed above.

Welcome, impressions, and a little about KymaPRO

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog about working as an IT Executive in BioPharma.

I recently moved from a Marketing company to the BioPharma industry, and it has been an interesting and enlightening transition.

Where I used to worry about how to get potential customers to purchase tires, insurance, or open a credit card solicitation, now I am worrying about how to reach people in the Biotech and Pharmaceutical industries at all levels and show them the amazing tools that my company, Kymanox, can offer them.

I recently joined Kymanox full-time, but prior to that, I was involved for several years on more of an advisory basis. I helped the company with Information Technology issues and slowly learned about the Biotech industry.

I have attended a number of industry events while being involved with Kymanox. Most recently, I attended the ISPE/CASA event at the RBC Center in Raleigh. I spoke with a number of interesting people who offered insight into the BioPharma industry and what is going on in the industry currently. While Biotech is not slowing down quite as much as some other industries, we are certainly seeing our share of the slowdown. One thing I particularly noted at this most recent event was the number of people looking for jobs. Hopefully, Biotech and Pharma can turn the corner soon. One of the ways to help the industry do that is to place an emphasis on reducing inefficiencies. I had numerous conversations about this at the conference. One problem I heard quite a bit was time lost to disorganization.

My company, Kymanox is particularly focused on project organization, or what is usually called project management. In fact, we have trademarked a phrase called "Ideal Knowledge Transfer" which I believe very effectively portrays the way in which we help companies reduce lost time and money. In pharmaceuticals, time is definitely money. Even in my short time in the industry, I cannot begin to count how many times I have heard someone mention the trouble they have with passing information back and forth. "Email Attachment Chaos" is a common phrase I hear quite often. I also hear things like, "we hit our deadline for completing the engineering piece of the project and thought everything was going great, but we have had a lot of trouble working with our partner in [Ireland/Japan/Sweden/India], and we are now going to miss the final deadline because we can't figure out how to get them the documents they need in a timely manner."

One of the ways Kymanox addresses this is with our software, KymaPRO. It is online project collaboration software which solves many of the problems associated with working in today's international environment. Time after time over the last 3 years, working with large biotech clients, we have seen difficulties in keeping projects on task because of problems transferring information. We developed the software in 2oo5 as a way to fix these problems. After trying other options for this, like Sharepoint, we found that we needed a tool built specifically for our biotech projects. We went to work and built a world-class tool for managing large pharmaceutical projects and called it KymaPRO.



For 3 years, KymaPRO has been a fantastic organizing tool for us. KymaPRO creates a central place for all project documents to be organized, has a fantastic search tool to help you find the document you need quickly, and allows access to only those individuals and companies that should have access. There is even an auditing capability so that you can easily see if someone on your project successfully downloaded your document. Best of all, the project is available online, 24/7, and is hosted in a secure, 128-bit encrypted, SSL environment.

We have just released version 2.0 of our tool which we are very excited about. So far our clients have been very excited about it.

Now it's my turn to get the word out. If you are looking for a world class project management and collaboration tool, please contact us at Kymanox, and we are sure you will be happy with KymaPRO.

Over the next weeks and months, I will update this blog with impressions and information that might be useful to those in BioPharma. I welcome comments and suggestions.

Finally, a word of thanks to all of those who have provided me with such a warm welcome into an exciting industry.