Veeva offers a comprehensive data repository of oncologists

Like a key opinion leader (KOL) database on steroids, Oncology Link has been created by Veeva Systems to provide pharma companies—and oncologists themselves—a comprehensive, continually updated view of what 100,000 or so leading medical scientists are doing in the field. “It’s partly aimed at pharma commercial activity, and partly aimed at the medical research community itself,” says Killian Weiss, GM of the business unit.

Why the focus on oncology? Simply put, it is a high-growth area in pharmaceutical development, and one where the research going on is broad and expanding. Enabling medical scientists to keep track of who’s doing what, better, will ultimately accelerate therapy development and commercialization of new drugs.

Oncology Link is said to combine the data stewardship that goes on with master-data management activities like Veeva’s OpenData, with analytics to provide such details as classifying oncologists by the types of tumors they study, or the biomarkers they work with. Weiss says that nearly 100 data stewards are dedicated to Oncology Link; the entire database is updated weekly. “There are literally thousands of oncology conferences that go on around the world,” he says, noting that classifying both the conference presenters, and the conferences that oncologists attend provides valuable insights to their professional profiles.

Oncology Link is currently being beta-tested by a number of pharma companies, and will be commercially available in July 2018.