Software to support drug discovery operations proves popular with a number of major organisations in Australia
ID Business Solutions (IDBS), a provider of integrated data management, analysis and decision-making software for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and animal health industries, has several satisfied users in Australia.
Csiro, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and Alchemia are among the organisations that have adopted IDBS's ActivityBase software suite to manage their chemical and biological drug discovery data.
Neil Kipling, chairman and CEO of IDBS commented: "The biotechnology sector in Australia is growing, and this uptake of ActivityBase by such pre-eminent companies in Australia is indicative of IDBS's leadership in the market.
"A solid foundation of data integration is an integral part of efficient discovery operations, as is the ability for multiple departments to share essential information.
"We are pleased to be able to fulfill this need".
Csiro Molecular Science (CMS) is a division of Csiro (Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation).
The molecular discovery programme is primarily focused on the collaborative discovery and development of agrochemical, animal health and pharmaceutical products.
CMS installed ActivityBase late in 2001.
According to Paul Savage, programme leader for molecular engineering: "ActivityBase saves time and money because all samples and results are in one place and easily accessible.
"Knowledge and results from previous projects can be stored and that information is searchable and available to gain leverage in new work".
The molecular discovery team attribute some of their success at attracting new collaborators to their strategy of centralising information within ActivityBase.
"Data from each project is securely separated, without us having to maintain multiple copies of database files," said Dr Savage.
"Since ActivityBase is widely used in the industry it provides collaborators with extra assurance of the security and quality of data, while streamlining data sharing".
Alchemia employs its proprietary drug discovery technology platform, called Vast technology, in a series of hit-discovery and hit-to-lead optimisation programmes, either in-house or in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies.
Alchemia creates small, focused libraries of pure compounds, which are subsequently screened to provide matrices of data.
Alchemia integrates all its data within ActivityBase from IDBS.
Wim Meutermans, director of chemistry, commented: "As Vast libraries independently and systematically explore structural and functional requirements for target binding, we need a similarly versatile database technology that enables us to analyse SAR in these terms.
"We find that ActivityBase is well-suited to our needs, is user friendly and highly versatile".
Cerylid Biosciences is a drug discovery company based in Melbourne, focused on the discovery and development of novel, small-molecule pharmaceuticals from naturally occurring compounds.
Cerylid has one of the world's largest natural product libraries containing extracts from samples of microbes, plants and marine organisms from the Australasian region.
The discovery researchers at Cerylid use XLfit from IDBS to carry out curve fitting and statistical analysis within the Microsoft Excel environment.
They use it to interrogate screening data both as part of assay development and when testing compounds in one or more biological assays.
Gian Sberna, research manager of the screening group said: "At Cerylid we have found XLfit to be particularly useful for the accurate calculation of IC50 data. "It is easy-to-use both for simple and complex data sets, with user-friendly options for manipulating and representing data."
