Chemistry

Chemical information management is one of the more mature areas of R&D informatics. Whole markets have been established around once formerly niche painpoints as chemical structure drawing and management, chemical registration and inventory, and electronic laboratory notebooks. Which explains why today's cheminformatics challenges are less about the lab and more about the business. R&D organizations are asking

• Whether their valuable intellectual property stored in ELNs and chemical registration systems is safe in the cloud
• Why researchers must use different queries to gather all the information they need on a compound--how to make it, where to buy it, what the literature says, and what their site already knows about it
• How to apply principles associated with global supply chain and logistics management to improve knowledge transfer and streamline workflows in R&D

One of the Pistoia Alliance's first working groups was established to determine the feasibility of developing an ELN query service for accessing different vendor ELNs. This working group developed use cases and engineered an initial prototype of the service, and the learnings from this group are informing the development of a broader chemistry strategy. Envisioned outcomes include the development of a universal chemistry query, ELN datamarts, and hosted services for managing the chemistry supply chain and in vitro and in vivo screening data.