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This is a really cool effort to overhaul the pharmaceutical software stack. They just had their big 1.0 launch today. Also 100% written in Julia. Super fast and

This is a really cool effort to overhaul the pharmaceutical software stack. They just had their big 1.0 launch today. Also 100% written in Julia. Super fast and uses all the latest tricks and ideas from pharmacometric science. I'm not working on this myself (other than fixing the occasional bug they run into), but some of my colleagues do. I'll see if I can point them here to answer questions.

ViralBShah 6y ago
Here's the stream from the event today, which talks more about what we released, and where it is going, with demos etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW6PFyk6l_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW6PFyk6l_s
- videep90 6y ago
  I highly recommend the story of IronShore .. it really speaks about the importance of having the right analysis stack along with the technology that can save share holders millions of dollars.. these are things Pumas and the team at Pumas-AI does on a day to day basis
skwb 6y ago
Yeah but pharma in my personal experience is VERY conservative. A lot of them still use SAS as their bread and butter for analysis. And guess what? All their older trials that they have to maintain are all written in SAS. It's basically how banking got stuck in a lot of legacy COBOL code, pharma got stuck in SAS. Want to do healthcare economic modeling? Buy a license for TreeAge (and it ain't cheap!). And it's not like you cannot do complex analysis in it, it just doesn't have a sleek interface. The "biggest" technology disputer in pharma I would argue would be Salesforce! They support creating all tons of custom input interfaces for patient consenting and record keeping. Enterprise ain't supposed to be sexy! I just sorta worry if there is correct culture fit in pharmaceuticals when there is a prevailing mentality of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
- KenoFischer 6y ago
  You're not wrong - Pharma is quite conservative. I wasn't convinced the the Pumas folks had any hope, but apparently the legacy workflow for what they have is so aweful that people are aching for something better. I'm not in the day to day, but from my perspective Pumas seems to be quite successful and well received in Pharma, despite the conservatism.
- ViralBShah 6y ago
  That might be true about some pharma software, but that does not mean there's no appetite for innovation. A lot of the computational work is done with decades old Fortran libraries, plugged into R (yup, no Python in this world) and spreadsheets. It is very hard to upgrade these old Fortran libraries to leverage capabilities of modern numerical stacks. The reason why companies have to hold on to their SAS and COBOL is that once a drug is out in the real world, and there is a lawsuit, or a recall - you need to be able to have everything available for review. These things can happen 20 or 30 years after a drug becomes available. That would naturally induce risk aversion. New drugs today will use newer tools, and 30 years out, we'll be saying the same things about today's tools. In fact pharma companies have no choice but to adapt. Technology moves fast, and anything that gives an edge, if not adopted, will leave you behind.
  - fock 6y ago
    What are these old Fortran libraries doing, which requires "new numerical stacks"? From my naive point of view, all what you are describing should be trivially done on a workstation. As I'm sure that's probably me underestimating the field: can you point me to some algorithm/technique which would benefit from new numerical stacks? Also is your stack open source? I somehow doubt the long-term advantage of one proprietary stack over another.
    - DrScientist 6y ago
      Winnonlin is one such tool - been around forever, written in fortran. One of the reasons it is still popular is for regulatory use it's very well understood. I'm not enough of an expert to answer the second part of your question - on why new numerical stacks are beneficial. It may be around building more complex models of PK/PD but I'm not up to speed on what winnonlin can and can't do.

ViralBShah 6y ago

Here's the stream from the event today, which talks more about what we released, and where it is going, with demos etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW6PFyk6l_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW6PFyk6l_s

videep90 6y ago
I highly recommend the story of IronShore .. it really speaks about the importance of having the right analysis stack along with the technology that can save share holders millions of dollars.. these are things Pumas and the team at Pumas-AI does on a day to day basis

skwb 6y ago

Yeah but pharma in my personal experience is VERY conservative. A lot of them still use SAS as their bread and butter for analysis. And guess what? All their older trials that they have to maintain are all written in SAS. It's basically how banking got stuck in a lot of legacy COBOL code, pharma got stuck in SAS. Want to do healthcare economic modeling? Buy a license for TreeAge (and it ain't cheap!). And it's not like you cannot do complex analysis in it, it just doesn't have a sleek interface. The "biggest" technology disputer in pharma I would argue would be Salesforce! They support creating all tons of custom input interfaces for patient consenting and record keeping. Enterprise ain't supposed to be sexy! I just sorta worry if there is correct culture fit in pharmaceuticals when there is a prevailing mentality of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

KenoFischer 6y ago
You're not wrong - Pharma is quite conservative. I wasn't convinced the the Pumas folks had any hope, but apparently the legacy workflow for what they have is so aweful that people are aching for something better. I'm not in the day to day, but from my perspective Pumas seems to be quite successful and well received in Pharma, despite the conservatism.
ViralBShah 6y ago
That might be true about some pharma software, but that does not mean there's no appetite for innovation. A lot of the computational work is done with decades old Fortran libraries, plugged into R (yup, no Python in this world) and spreadsheets. It is very hard to upgrade these old Fortran libraries to leverage capabilities of modern numerical stacks. The reason why companies have to hold on to their SAS and COBOL is that once a drug is out in the real world, and there is a lawsuit, or a recall - you need to be able to have everything available for review. These things can happen 20 or 30 years after a drug becomes available. That would naturally induce risk aversion. New drugs today will use newer tools, and 30 years out, we'll be saying the same things about today's tools. In fact pharma companies have no choice but to adapt. Technology moves fast, and anything that gives an edge, if not adopted, will leave you behind.
- fock 6y ago
  What are these old Fortran libraries doing, which requires "new numerical stacks"? From my naive point of view, all what you are describing should be trivially done on a workstation. As I'm sure that's probably me underestimating the field: can you point me to some algorithm/technique which would benefit from new numerical stacks? Also is your stack open source? I somehow doubt the long-term advantage of one proprietary stack over another.
  - DrScientist 6y ago
    Winnonlin is one such tool - been around forever, written in fortran. One of the reasons it is still popular is for regulatory use it's very well understood. I'm not enough of an expert to answer the second part of your question - on why new numerical stacks are beneficial. It may be around building more complex models of PK/PD but I'm not up to speed on what winnonlin can and can't do.