Scientist.com Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary

Admittedly, Scientist.com was founded as Assay Depot in mid-2007, and first appeared in the news later that fall, but as 2017 comes to a close, it’s time to pause and reflect on where the company has been, where it’s headed and how the drug discovery landscape has evolved.

Scientist.com was founded in 2007 by Kevin Lustig (current CEO), Chris Petersen (current CTO) and Andrew Martin. To put things in perspective, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth won the Academy Award for Feature Documentary that year, Time magazine placed “Stem Cell Discoveries” at the top of its list of Top 10 Scientific Discoveries and the Great Recession was just beginning.

Industry-wise, the FDA approved 18 novel drugs in 2007, the lowest number of approvals in the last 10 years and the second lowest since 1983. As of this writing, 42 novel drugs have been approved this year; that’s roughly a 133% increase from 2007. While this increase is noteworthy on several different fronts, it has come at a price. The cost of bringing a new drug to market is somewhere around $2.6 billion according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, up from $1.5 billion in the 2000s.

This brings us to the central challenge facing researchers today: how to maintain the recent pace of new drug discoveries and continue to grow business while employing fewer resources (time, money, materials and so on). One solution to this problem being replicated across the pharmaceutical industry is turning to outsourcing for much of the preclinical R&D. According to one report, money spent on drug discovery outsourcing in 2016 should only grow over the next decade and will likely become a $43.7 billion dollar industry by 2026.

Enter Scientist.com. The Scientist.com marketplace was designed to create faster science by helping transform the way scientists and research organizations approach sourcing. It increases access to the most-qualified suppliers in the industry, provides a customer-centric sourcing process and operates one-of-a-kind outsourcing compliance tools. The marketplace empowers scientists by allowing them to focus their attention on actual research, not paperwork.

So, what does 2018 hold in store for Scientist.com? As CEO and Founder Kevin Lustig said, “From our inception, our mission has been to empower and connect scientists worldwide.” In 2018, look for Scientist.com to do this faster, more efficiently and for more scientists in more places.