Drug discovery arm of leading UK cancer charity implements informatics platform to manage its chemical and biological drug discovery data
ID Business Solutions (IDBS) reports that Cancer Research Technology (CRT), a drug discovery company based in London wholly owned by the charity Cancer Research UK, will implement IDBS's ActivityBase informatics platform to manage its chemical and biological drug discovery data.
Working at the critical interface between academic research and the pharmaceutical industry, CRT's role is to accelerate promising discoveries from the 200+ academic research projects funded by Cancer Research UK, into effective therapeutics in the clinic.
Until recently, most of CRT's successes have been in the development of novel techniques, for example, new types of high-throughput screens for DNA repair enzymes.
Now, CRT is expanding its screening and lead optimisation capacity, aiming to deliver significant new chemical entities for development by partners in the pharmaceutical industry.
"Improving potency is one of our main goals but we want to be sure that improving potency doesn't create problems in, for example, one of our selectivity, ADME or toxicity assays.
"Therefore, being able to track all that data against a structure is absolutely vital," commented Tim Hammonds, group leader for assay development and screening.
"We needed a robust informatics platform that could integrate both our chemical inventory and all our biological data easily since we have limited IT backup," added Tony Raynham, head of medicinal chemistry.
"We know ActivityBase is the industry standard for biology, but we knew less about the chemistry side so we pushed hard to satisfy ourselves that it was equally strong.
"We chose ActivityBase because it is a mature product that gave us the best all-round solution," commented Dr Raynham.
Neil Kipling, chairman and CEO of IDBS, commented: "CRT is at the forefront of harnessing the insights gained about the molecular basis of cancer and turning these into tangible patient benefits as fast as possible.
"IDBS is pleased to be working with CRT, providing a scalable, out-of-the-box information infrastructure that will facilitate its work with minimal maintenance overheads."
