Microsoft Corp. has announced the winners of the Microsoft(R) Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2006, honoring the breakthrough contributions that companies are making in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries through the best use of Microsoft-based solutions.
The awards were announced at the annual meeting of the Drug Information Association (DIA) in Philadelphia.
Award contenders consisted of worldwide life sciences corporations in biotechnology, diagnostics, medical equipment and devices, pharmaceuticals, animal health, nutritional products, and consumer health products.
In the category of Sales and Marketing, the award was presented to GlaxoSmithKline for its solution utilizing a Tablet PC, powered by Windows(R) XP Tablet PC Edition, and Proscape Technologies Inc.’s software. The solution has allowed GSK to dramatically reduce the cycle time between introducing a new product marketing campaign and measuring its results.
In the category of Manufacturing and Supply Chain, the award was given to ALTANA Pharma AG (Konstanz, Germany) for implementing Wassermann AG’s wayRTS (Real Time Simulation) solution-a 64-bit application using several Microsoft components-for the operational planning, simulation and scheduling of its largest supply chain across three production sites and eight sales units.
Pfizer Inc. received an award for its solution, Catalyst, which utilizes several Microsoft technologies to allow industry workers to design, schedule and analyze pharmaceutical manufacturing processes using a graphical user interface in a fraction of the time required by existing electronic and manual systems.
In the category of Clinical Development, the award was presented to PRA International (Reston, Va), a global clinical research organization. With the help of DataLabs, Inc., PRA International rolled out FlexDMS, a single data management system that unifies the functionality of paper data entry (PDE) with the flexibility of electronic data capture (EDC) into one, easy-to-use electronic clinical data management platform.
For more information about the winners, visit the Microsoft Life Sciences Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/lifesciences.