Under the terms of the agreement, Germany's second-biggest drug and chemical maker will implement InforSense's development platform to assist in its drug discovery decision-making. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The InforSense KDE Platform enables visual integration and interrogation of any data analysis process. Employing WYSIWYG composition of processes as workflows, with error prevention, speeds the process of "solution building", and eliminates the need to "hard-wire" or program events.
The InforSense KDE Platform allows ad-hoc applications to be produced allowing users to become their own solution builder. The platform thus provides an integrative infrastructure to support data neutral composition and deployment of analytic solutions by our customers.
"To identify and optimise potential drug leads, Bayer's chemists need both rapid processing of large compound libraries via chemical cartridge technology coupled with easy access to best of breed proprietary and third party analytic tools and visualisations," said Alexander Hillisch, head of computational chemistry at Bayer Healthcare.
"InforSense Open Discovery Workflow technology offers the appropriate environment for rapidly composing data and applications, including our in-house in silico ADMET tools, to optimise our high-throughput cheminformatics analysis," he added.
With the explosion of available data and information, individuals, teams and organisations have experienced exponential increases in the challenge of deriving knowledge and understanding to make informed decisions.
Usually, a pharmaceutical company such as Bayer would be expected to produce 30-50 compounds per year and approximately 10,000 assay wells per year, dealing with limited data types using a reductionist approach.
In the last 5 years, "industrialisation" of the drug discovery process has occurred. Chemists now produce 10,000 compounds or more per year and screen 100 million assay wells per year.
There has also been a biological revolution, requiring the holistic view and interpretation of data, the requirement to integrate data from a variety of scientific disciplines, and the application of complex algorithms and statistics to discover relationships.
A spokeswoman for InforSense told DrugResearcher.com: "Bayer were looking for as way to integrate diverse data repositories with a variety of analytic tools - both internally developed and commercial analysis and visualization programs."
"Indeed we have customers using our integrative analytics platform to enhance productivity across life sciences R&D, healthcare and business analytics," she added.