informatics for CROs
Specialising in the discovery and development of novel small molecule drugs, the labs at Evotec use ChemAxon’s JChem suite
Berry warns that, while
the right choice can improve effi ciency, the wrong one can cause problems in the long run. The company therefore pilots software before committing to deployment. When deciding which ELN to implement, three vendors were short listed and their software ran on individual laptops. Chemists and biologists
performed the same experiment on each and ‘it was very telling which one they preferred,’ says Berry. ‘Some were very feature- rich and could have provided a lot of functionality, but the response was that our researchers would never use those features. There is defi nitely a feeling of keep it simple as this provides the best fl exibility,’ he continues. The company eventually
For organisations such as
Evotec that have the benefi t of an internal development team, there is often the question of build versus buy when it comes to choosing a software solution. Berry points out that
internally-developed software is fl exible and can provide the scientist with exactly what they want, but that there are also many advantages to buying off the shelf as others have most likely solved any problems. ‘For many software tools, it’s
about building a community of users and bringing them together to help build up a knowledge base for that individual supplier. Knime is an example of this – it is a workfl ow tool which has an increasing user base. Recently, a group of life science companies got together to share ideas and concepts, and help each other and the vendor to enhance their product to make it more useful,’ he comments.
www.scientific-computing.com
chose to implement a corporate- wide ELN provided by Contur Software which integrates with some of the in-house databases and uses ChemAxon software for chemistry drawing and combinatorial chemistry. Berry comments that this year they will also be implementing SharePoint as a way of collaborating internally and then eventually externally as well. ‘We chose these suppliers for several reasons – namely that their solutions were fl exible and easy to use. Both provide end products, e.g. Marvin Draw, but also a mature API (application programming interface), so we are able to extend their functionality to provide added value to our scientists. ‘For example, our small in-house development team has built a compound ordering system containing more than 12 million supplier compounds, fully structure searchable and linked through to the company ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to make the compound ordering process as easy as possible for our scientists.’ He notes that, while these
systems weren’t necessarily the cheapest, they did, in his opinion, offer the best value for money for the functionality that they provided.
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011 9
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