Programs

Introduction

In biotech and pharma, scientific work is rarely done in isolation: every experiment, analysis, and finding exists in the context of a program it's meant to inform. In practice, that connection can lost when data lives in disconnected tools, analyses pile up in shared drives, and by the time results reach a decision-maker, the thread back to the original scientific question has frayed. In Pluto, Programs are specifically designed to close that gap. By linking every dataset, analysis, and visualization directly to a program and its current stage, Pluto gives scientific leaders a continuous, traceable view of what work is happening, what questions it's answering, and what program-level decisions it's moving forward.

Creating a program

Navigate to the Programs overview page shown above and select + New program in the upper right corner or under any program stage. Give your program an informative name (typically, the way it's most commonly referred to internally) and select from one of the available program types created by your company admins.

👉 Tip: Define custom program types for how your organization works, learn more here

Program fields

A program's metadata provides valuable context for all downstream activities performed by your team, so it's well worth the time to enter.

Some especially important attributes to point out:

• Owner: select the user that is the program lead and primary point of contact

• Therapeutic area(s): use the dropdown to select one or multiple therapeutic areas. This field is used for helping filter programs, datasets, and analyses later on.

  • Example: For a systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) program, you might select both the Immunology & Inflammation therapeutic areas

• Modalities: use the dropdown to select 1 modality being used by the program, or multiple modalities being explored or combined

• Target declared:

  • Select No if a program is still narrowing in on a target (e.g. in early target discovery, identification, and validation). In this mode, Pluto will emphasize analyses that explore multiple targets and help rank, score, and prioritize a list of targets for an iterative narrowing process.

  • Select Yes if a program has declared a target. In this mode, Pluto will suggest analyses that increase confidence through orthogonal angles, such as therapeutic framing, disease relevance, mechanistic and functional evidence, preclinical model alignment, patient population, and more.

Program metadata can be edited by program admins any time over the course of its life.