3 min read

Every day counts in biotech R&D

When I was seven years old, my mom was diagnosed with leukemia. We were a freshly immigrated family, still figuring out how to navigate life in a new country, and suddenly everything we thought we knew about our future got turned upside down.

What followed were grueling months of watching her struggle through various treatment approaches that weren't working. As a kid, I didn't understand the medical details, but I could see the toll it was taking on her and on our family. 

While my mom was battling her disease, a drug called Gleevec was working its way through the approval process. When it finally became available for her specific type of leukemia, a couple of years later, everything changed. She did a complete 180. Not only did she recover, but she's been disease-free for years now. She retired last year and then decided to come out of retirement to go back to school for what she was passionate about before she got sick.

Looking back, we were among the lucky ones. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Gleevec had taken a couple of years longer to get approved. What if the research behind it had been delayed, or if the IP had never been successfully commercialized? What if bureaucratic delays or operational issues had pushed its availability just a few years further out?

I might not have my mom with me today. And our family's story would be entirely different.


This experience deeply formed how I think about biotech today. When we talk about accelerating R&D timelines or eliminating operational inefficiencies, we're talking about getting life-saving treatments to real people, often with devastating diseases, faster. Every month shaved off a development timeline could mean thousands of patients getting access to course-altering treatment sooner.

On average, it takes 10-15 years for a new drug to go from discovery to patient access. But buried in those statistics are countless stories of operational friction that adds months or years unnecessarily. Biotech teams hunt for data across disconnected systems. Critical decisions get delayed because teams can't quickly assess where their programs stand. Promising compounds get deprioritized because the data to support investment decisions isn't readily accessible.

These small inefficiencies accumulate and stretch timelines just long enough to matter. Or, even more devastatingly, they result in groundbreaking IP never seeing the light of day, because the team behind it is shut down.

The opposite is equally powerful. A medicinal chemistry team with instant visibility into design cycle status across their portfolio makes faster decisions about which compounds to prioritize or which hypotheses to double down on. R&D Ops teams catch data gaps immediately rather than six weeks later in a team meeting if they have real-time visibility into outsourced work. CSOs who can quickly assess IND-filing readiness focus resources on the most time-sensitive gaps.

We see this regularly with our customers. Teams gain 2-3 months of acceleration on key annual targets, or chemistry teams significantly increase throughput by having better visibility into their workflows. Companies create "wow, that's impressive" moments with pharma partners, which unlocks new funding for advancing their brilliant discoveries, because they can demonstrate clear progress and systematic decision-making.

That visibility makes their science more likely to succeed, and to succeed faster.

The beauty of this industry is that nearly everyone working in biotech has their own version of why this work matters. Maybe it's a family member who battled cancer, a friend with a rare disease, or just knowing that the work we do can actually transform lives. But when you're deep in the day-to-day weeds of R&D, that bigger picture can fade. Operational excellence starts feeling like just another business metric instead of the moral imperative it really is.

Every part of the biotech ecosystem can help get treatments to patients faster. Investors, software companies, biotech teams themselves – we all have a role in eliminating the friction that stretches timelines unnecessarily. At Kaleidoscope, we're acutely aware that we’re just one small part of this mission. We're not discovering drugs or running clinical trials. But if we can help biotech teams make decisions faster, if we can eliminate some of the operational friction that adds months to timelines, we're helping get treatments to patients sooner.

That's not just good business. That's the whole point.

Bogdan Knezevic, Co-Founder & CEO


Kaleidoscope is a software platform for biotechs to robustly manage their R&D operations. With Kaleidoscope, teams can plan, monitor, and de-risk their programs with confidence, ensuring that they hit key milestones on time and on budget. By connecting projects, critical decisions, and underlying data in one spot, Kaleidoscope enables biotech start-ups to save months each year in their path to market.