In transforming how researchers access curated biological content and apply it to their workflow, Molloy says the scientific process begins by addressing facts already known—“yet these facts are often hard to find and siloed, making the task harder than it needs to be, particularly in today’s data-rich age,” he says. “For many years, chemists have benefited from access to online data, and this is a natural part of their workflow. Access to rich biology content levels the playing field and enables biologists to build better hypotheses, avoid rework and save time. In a short period, this functionality will be not just commonplace, but expected by every biologist.”  

 

The combined solution will accelerate biological research in areas such as target identification and validation, experimental pharmacology, toxicology and biomarker discovery.  

 

“Biology is an important research area for our customers, and we are working to gather and deliver the highest quality and most relevant scientific content across the R&D lifecycle to help organizations speed innovation and deliver actionable insights and results,” explains Joseph F. Donahue, senior vice president of global sales at Thomson Reuters.  

 

According to Neil Kipling, founder and CEO of IDBS, partnering with Thomson Reuters will streamline advanced biological research for customers.  

 

“It is crucial for researchers to have a solid knowledge base of the results of previous studies in order to direct future investigations,” he says. “Previously, scientists would need to search in various systems and collate data manually. Now they can access insightful data at the right point in their research, presenting considerable savings in time and effort.”  

 

The collaborators are already able to see success in the conversations with their customers, who are engaged and excited by the prospect of getting more from their data.  

 

“They are also pleased that their strategic IT partners are thinking of their issues and coming to them with innovation,” Molloy concludes. “It’s a very different relationship from that of a simple IT or ELN vendor. In the longer term, both Thomson Reuters and IDBS will see commercial return in the expansion of the use of curated content and E-WorkBook, which is very much a tool for positive change in R&D organizations.”

 

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IDBS extends partnership with ChemAxon to boost ELN Parallel Synthesis capabilities  

 

LONDON—IDBS also announced April 25 that it will extend a partnership with cheminformatics software developer ChemAxon to add new functionality to its ChemBook electronic laboratory notebook (ELN).   ChemBook is part of IDBS’ E-WorkBook Suite, a science-neutral ELN used across enterprises from basic research through to manufacturing.  

 

IDBS has added ChemAxon’s Reactor engine, known as the Parallel Synthesis add-on, to support the workflows of chemists, synthesizing libraries of compounds in a parallel fashion. Reactor is a high-performance library enumeration engine that produces synthetically relevant virtual libraries. Chemists can define a generic reaction or a set of reactant structures and combine the two to enumerate and iteratively tune a set of product compounds and discrete reactions on a high-throughput scale.   According to the companies, this process removes tedious recording and drawing-out of chemical reactions multiple times.  

 

“Intelligent and flexible enumeration of chemical reactions for compound library design and combinatorial chemistry is an essential capability within an ELN environment. In choosing our Reactor, IDBS is bringing leading-edge performance and usability to ChemBook clients,” said Alex Drijver, CEO of ChemAxon, in a statement. “We look forward to bringing more functionality and performance as we continue to expand our relationship with IDBS.”