The new platform is a blend of ChemAxon’s JChem – desktop software that allows researchers to both create and share chemical structure information – with TIBCO’s Spotfire tech, which allows for visual data exploration.
Ben McGraw, director of life sciences industry solutions at TIBCO told in-PharmaTechnologist the newly joined platforms will allow scientists to create images of thousands of their potential compounds.
He said that by scanning the visually presented chemicals, they can quickly single-out viable options for synthesis, and can view potentially unknown aspects of their scientific data.
“Researchers can quickly and visually filter through thousands of chemical and non-chemical records, locate the chemical or non-chemical data of interest and move quickly to the next phase of development,” he said.
In a joint statement, Alex Drijver, CEO of ChemAxon, said the partnership is part of a drive to improve efficiency in chemical research.
The firms are now offering the technology as a service to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.
Visualising the future
McGraw said the use of visualisation software for potential drug compounds is the future of pre-clinical validation.
However, he added that traditional imaging tech is often lacking because it does not have “dimension-free” imaging capabilities – in other words, the ability to explore a digital compound structure from any angle without any constraints.
“Prior methods like static or canned reports do not enable the dimension-free data exploration and contextual collaboration that Spotfire provides, allowing chemists to spot trends in complex datasets through the use of multiple linking visualizations and chemical structure viewing.”
Of ChemAxon’s previous offering, he added that although JChem is a useful data share tool, alone it does not provide enough information to cut-it in the world of drug discovery.
“JChem allows scientists to create, explore and share chemical and non-chemical data stored in local and remote databases. However, that is not enough,” McGraw said.
“Scientists need to be able to search, carry-out analysis and visualise the chemical structures to be able to choose the correct compounds to synthesise.”