Author: Christian Velten

Let’s start with a joke. “What are three Germans doing that you have put into one room? – Founding an association!” In Germany we have associations for everything in the smallest village. Associations of hen breeders, associations of stamp collectors, associations of local singers, associations of hobby gardeners, associations of wine drinkers, associations of The Kelly Family concert visitors, and so on. Since late 2001 we additionally have the German Society for Proteome Research (DGPF), whose very first founding charter was wrote down on a beer mat (well, we are in Germany, aren’t we). The foundation of the DGPF by…

Well, honestly, things are on the move these days. Scientists and publishers are discussing new ways of publishing scientific results. EMBO starts an initiative to set up a platform that will provide services relating to access and retrieval of digital information in the life sciences, ranging from bibliographic or factual data to published full text – E-BioSci. Even database publishers draw nearer academic institutions to promote their content products. Last week scientists and information providers met at the 8th annual meeting of the German Information and Communication Initiative of the Learned Societies entitled “Open Systems for the Communication in Science…

In 2003 I had the opportunity to talk to Prof. Dr. Gottfried Schatz, at that time President of the Swiss Science and Technology Council, at the Handelsblatt-conference “Trends in Biotechnology” in Vienna, where Gottfried Schatz had held a lecture about research barriers within Europe. Gottfried Schatz offensively criticized that the European systems of university education and research funding hinder the development of scientific excellence. In his view, money for research – by working after the principle of discriminate all-round distribution – was too broadly scattered instead of promoting purposefully. Permanent academic positions and the rigid hierarchy structures at European universities…

In April 2009, a new line management of our team at Novartis asked for a new internal scientific information tool. The specification was  something like “PubMed … but much better!” (PubMed is a public search engine for bio-medical scientific literature, provided by none other than the US National Institutes of Health) The whole team met the spontaneous challenge, which came on top of concurrent pressure regarding resources as well as a quite high basic load regarding obligatory standard deliveries. I am still proud that I had the opportunity to be part of a real success story. After only 7 months for development and implementation we provided…

I would like to share this article that was once published by Patrick Scholler in my former online journal Inside-Lifescience. I think it is worth not to be lost … Originally published in November 2001 by Inside-Lifescience, ISSN 1610-0255.

The fact that the 2001 Nobel Price in Medicine has been awarded to three Yeast researchers should not lead to the wrong conclusion that the Nobel committee appreciated the fight against alcoholism or overweight. In fact without the tasty products of Brewers or Bakers Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) our lives would be much more healthy but – honestly – less nicer. Coming to the point, the award really recognizes the contributions of Leland Hartwell, Paul Nurse and Timothy Hunt to the understanding the control mechanisms of the cell cycle, the molecular cell division management system. I myself did research on cell…

Two weeks ago I participated in a strategy workshop organized by Arthur D. Little and the German Ministry for Education and Science (BMBF). As part of our talks we discussed the value of scientific information as well as the existing scientific information distribution and access structures. As two major problems we identified that scientists are not really aware of a variety of information resources they could access, and that publication and valuation processes will intensively change within the next years. To provide you with the corresponding background: the BMBF commissioned the management consultant Arthur D. Little and the ‘Gesellschaft für…

Within 5 weeks in Q2/2009, I designed and implemented a new literature support process for periodic safety reports by Novartis Drug Safety. The service was fully compliant to regulatory requirements and covered all global Novartis drugs (~160) as well as all periodic safety reports to relevant authorities by Novartis Global Drug Safety (PSUR, PBRER, ASR, DSUR). For example in 2012 and 2013, around 1’000 produkt-related literature searches per year were processed by the service (on average 85 per month). Originally this process had been intended to be an interim solution. But due to its stability, reliability and scalability, it was subsequently expanded to Sandoz (generics) and Novartis Vaccines products, and…

Between 2009 and 2013, I responsibly cared for the internal customer relationship management on behalf of the Novartis Knowledge Management business unit. My objectives had been to proactively manage customer relations, to align our deliveries with our clients’ business needs, to design efficient customer service processes ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction, and to coordinate the customer support team. In this role, I responsibly conducted an  internal customer survey by doing series of interviews with middle and senior management stakeholders. I published the results in April 2009 as internal  report “Current situation of the Novartis Pharma internal information supply – An analysis of needs and…

Journalists as well as politicians are desperately looking for lab results that nicely fit to a political ideology.