How this founder is fixing pharma’s data bottleneck

This article summarizes an episode of The Brand Called You’s video series featuring Justin Byers, founder and CEO of Axio BioPharma.

Justin Byers, founder and CEO of Axio BioPharma/ Photo credit: Justin Byers

In drug development, the bottleneck increasingly falls between scientific discovery and manufacturing. Justin Byers, founder and CEO of Axio BioPharma, argues that accelerating productivity now depends directly on strict data control.

Moving knowledge cleanly from the lab to the production floor, across sponsors, contract manufacturers, and software vendors, is critical to avoiding delays.

Data systems now control the pace

Modern drug labs generate detailed results, but those insights die if they stay locked in isolated software. The biggest breakdowns happen during handoffs between the lab, development, quality, and manufacturing teams.

Byers put it this way, “The science kept getting better, we kept making better discoveries, and the instruments kept improving, but one big challenge kept popping up: the information connecting it all stayed broken.”

When teams lose the context behind a result, projects stall and useful discoveries face avoidable delays. The pressing challenge is determining who funds and controls the shared data layer. If teams buy isolated tools without establishing shared rules, the company ends up with disjointed systems.

Handoffs strip out manufacturing context

A single temperature reading or lab note means very little if the receiving team cannot see how it fits into the larger batch record. This data loss becomes a major risk when a drug sponsor hands a project over to an outside contract manufacturer.

“We’ve got dozens of different systems, all designed to do individual tasks… but they all have the same problem: they don’t talk to each other,” Byers notes.

This disconnect results in slower tech transfers, flawed batch comparisons, and redundant work. Even if a sponsor believes they shared everything required, the receiving manufacturer may still lack the clear records needed to scale the process.

To solve this, companies need a shared framework that translates local data into useful insights across research, clinical manufacturing, and quality teams.

Neutral data rules make sharing possible

These messy handoffs highlight a structural barrier. The system linking companies must be trusted by firms that often compete.

Drug sponsors refuse to hand over proprietary process data, and contract manufacturers will not let rivals control the market’s connectivity. To solve this, Axio links existing systems while allowing each party to maintain control over its own data and access rules.

As Byers explains, “We didn’t want to go to pharma [companies] and ask them to give up their crown jewels, their secret sauce. We learned that we had to take a federated approach to bringing AI to their data… in a secure and governed fashion, where we keep that information locked down.”

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