Managing a large group of scientists, jokes Milton Smith, can be like “corralling cats.” That’s particularly so if the scientists whose work you’re overseeing are based in medical schools and private- and public-sector labs scattered throughout the U.S. and Canada. The organizations Smith is working with make up the Advanced Medical Countermeasures Consortium, a group developing a drug-delivery therapy to serve as a first-response stabilizer for people exposed to avian flu H5N1, anthrax or mustard gas. To organize and delegate the research that’s being conducted, Smith and his partners use Mindjet’s MindManager.
While research on the therapy has received some federal funding, thus far the consortium has gotten no backing from private drug companies. “By using universities, we had a low-cost method of doing research and development, but we had to manage a complex task involving many components,” says Smith. Smith is a physician and president of Paw Paw, Mich.-based Amaox Ltd., a biotech company established in 1992 to study the therapeutic benefits of liposomes and that now acts as a bridge between government agencies and universities for the consortium effort. “The only way I could manage all these collaborators and the components they were working on was to use mind mapping,” he says.
Read more at: Computerworld