Why do you need the world’s best and most secure document platform for your Life Science information?
Life Science clients, including pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical/biotechnology and medial device/scientific instrument companies are looking for a better way to share, yet protect, proprietary information during due diligence with their external partners. This information may include scientific studies, clinical trial protocols and reports, regulatory filings, intellectual property (IP) summaries and filings, financials, market research and more. How can Merrill DataSite® help and what should you look for when comparing solutions and making a purchase decision?
Throughout development, internal and external parties are going to collect and analyze data and then make very important decisions based on that information. These decisions will determine how the project will advance and who, other than the founders, will assist in bringing the drug or product to market.
During a progressive drug or product development cycle, as more parties become involved, effective information sharing becomes critical. In fact, inefficient communication could become a major obstacle to progress. Because pre-clinical and clinical data are often paper based, replicating and shipping that paper content to investigators and stakeholders can pose security and logistical concerns not to mention being costly and time consuming.
A recent case study conducted by Merrill DataSite profiled an emerging biotech company as it took its new drug from proof of concept to development. It sought a global pharmaceutical firm to license, co-develop and improve on its commercialization efforts. The company attracted multiple interested parties for out-license projects, each of whom undertook detailed due diligence. As part of this process, the company shared highly confidential clinical and operation information with each potential partner.
In today’s highly competitive life science licensing environment, companies need a better, more efficient way to respond to potential opportunities and protect their interests. Increasingly, licensing professionals are relying on virtual data room technology to save time, minimize risk and gain more control over the licensing process.
Many leading life science companies prefer the Merrill DataSite virtual data room solution to address their specific business needs. Not only does Merrill DataSite streamline and improve the due diligence process, it provides uncompromised security to protect the company’s intellectual property.
Tip #1: Utilize a platform which allows viewing of documents with no software needed by the viewer BUT does not allow YOUR documents to be downloaded by anyone. Only Merrill DataSite can deliver this feature for all types of documents.
One of the big benefits of using Merrill DataSite is that you can invite potential partners to start digging into the depths of documents early on, from the comfort of their own office, and spend as much time looking as they wish. They will still want to come out and visit the company, but when they do, the discussions are directed toward specific documents and specific issues and the result is a much more fruitful meeting. Gathering information about those people reviewing your information is instantaneous. Each user’s activity, down to the individual pages viewed and time spent on each page, is available. This enables critical assessment of a party’s level of interest and provides intelligence on their specific areas of focus while keeping a permanent record of their due diligence activities.
Tip #2: If you can’t tell what pages are being looked at by whom and when, you have the wrong platform. Merrill DataSite is the only platform in the world which can do this for all documents from all file sources.
Due diligence is conducted in accordance with the permission levels that have been established for each of the participants. Access is unlimited for all users worldwide, including question and answer functionality and notifications of new documents as they are added.
Tip #3: It should not only be easy to add new participants and disable others but it should also be seamless to add documents without cumbersome changes to the security of those documents and current user’s permissions. Only Merrill DataSite has new documents “inherit” the security of the folder where it is placed. Don’t waste your time on systems which require you to create security for each document and each user as you add the new document. With Merrill DataSite, site administrators can quickly and securely grant users access and allow or deny print and/or download permissions.
Merrill DataSite is an excellent pre-launch platform, where documents can be prepared before they are shared with potential partners. You can use DataSite’s comprehensive character based search tools to preview all information in the entire database to ensure that critical information is appropriately presented and protected and that all user permissions are correctly assigned.
Tip #4: You should be able to search every character of every page with no additional work done by those loading the documents. Merrill DataSite performs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on every letter in each and every document.
With large document collections, sophisticated search features are key to finding critical information and accelerating the due diligence process. Merrill DataSite’s search capabilities allow users to search tens – if not hundreds of thousands of pages to find what’s relevant to them. Merrill DataSite’s search capabilities ensure nothing is missed in any of the posted documents - regardless of where they may be organized within the index
(e.g. find every instance of “contract” and “termination” within 5 words of each other, etc.). Search results are returned very quickly and are unlimited in terms of document results and hits within a document.
Tip #5: If someone tells you “the user just has to add this small applet in order to protect this document” run quickly to the phone and contact Merrrill DataSite!
Merrill DataSite controls document viewing so information is never left unprotected on the user’s PC. Unlike other virtual deal room platforms which use technology requiring additional software downloading to have some secure document features, images of pages are never left to cache on the viewers PC with Merrill DataSite. Documents are viewed through a sophisticated Java encrypted viewer – no files are downloaded and no files are left on the user’s hard drive. Merrill is the ASP and does not outsource the hosting of client information.
Tip #6: If you can’t ask a question from within a document, if you can’t answer a question without launching another window or platform and if you can’t direct people to documents with a simple click of the mouse, you are using the wrong VDR. Get Merrill DataSite!
Merrill DataSite’s integrated Q&A Forum allows administrators to track and respond to participant questions without using any outside tools. Questions and responses are available for immediate action and can be assigned by the Q&A manager to other experts in particular subjects. The Q&A Forum eliminates the need to track individual emails or compile spreadsheets, while enhancing security and making it easy for the person asking the question to do so with one mouse click from any page of a document. The community based forum for user teams and groups can privately ask questions which automatically are associated with the related document or folder.
Tip #7: What’s the fairest method to pay for a long term VDR platform?
Some VDR providers who use less secure downloading of documents as the delivery platform try to disguise deceptive pricing by using the words “enterprise” pricing which gained favor for some products and services in the later part of the 20th century. Don’t be fooled! At any stage of the process there is no financial advantage for you to pay UP FRONT for anything you may or may not use later. You should pay for what you put on the site, when you put it on the site and use the pages. Period. You should not pay for a large number of pages with the promise that you can set up an “unlimited” number of projects during the year. Forget projects as a measurement – it has no meaning especially when YOU are the person who has to do all of the work to set it up.
Forget users as a measurement too.
What matters is pages and don’t pay for them until you load them and USE them on the site. Paying $85,000 for 100,000 pages as an “enterprise” agreement may sound like a bargain until you end the year with 50,000 pages and realize you just paid $1.70 per page for what you really used. Don’t get fooled either by someone telling you that the cost of pages over the initial “enterprise” agreement can only be bought in “blocks” of 10,000 pages at a time. Does 10,000 pages for $5,000 sound like a bargain? It does until you only use 3,000 of them. They just cost you $1.60 each and you PAID for them upfront too!
Merrill DataSite looks at your live pages each month and sends you a simple bill per page, per month and it’s about 30% less than the pricing above. Also, we have no extras for “out of scope” and “after hours” charges or for any of our other 24 hour services. It’s all included in the simple per page per month rate.
We want to do a live demonstration, in your offices and give you a legally binding statement of work with all pricing at the conclusion. With more than 5,000 new projects last year, and nearly 2 million unique visitors performing electronic due diligence on thousands of transaction totaling trillions of dollars in asset value we hope you will choose Merrill DataSite to help with your next project.
