To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
Symyx Technologies, Inc.
Headquarters
Santa Clara, Calif.
Location(s)
Santa Clara, Calif.; Sunnyvale, Calif,; San Ramon, Calif.; Iselin, N.J.; Bend, Ore.; Basel Switzerland; Tokyo, Japan
Years in Drug Research
11 Years
Spokesperson
Richard Boehner, President, Symyx Research
Web site
About the company
Symyx Technologies, Inc. enables industry leaders in life sciences, chemicals and energy, and consumer and industrial products to accelerate scientific research and development, minimize the time their scientists spend on routine, repetitive tasks, and maximize their return on R&D investments. Through expertise in scientific informatics management and micro-scale, parallel experimentation, Symyx software, tools and research services help scientists design, execute, analyze, and report experimental results faster, easier, and less expensively.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Ten years ago, Symyx’s primary focus was research. The company was founded on the basis of high-throughput experimentation for chemical and energy companies. Over time, Symyx applied that technology and advanced informatics to the pharmaceutical industry in a variety of applications, including formulations, stability and solubility.
Our Tools and Software products evolved out of this research. We also acquired software that complemented our tools and research, and we recently acquired IntegrityBio, which extends our research services into large-molecule biopharmaceuticals.
Over the past decade, life science companies have come under more and more pressure to reduce costs and accelerate drug research in order to reach better decisions faster and less expensively. Symyx has positioned itself to help companies reach both goals either by deploying our software and tools for in-house scientific informatics management and small-scale, parallel experimentation, or by accessing the same capabilities and benefits through outsourced research services.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
Within the pharmaceutical industry, it’s pretty clear that there’s going to be reduced internal research done by large pharma because they’re likely to be buying compounds and molecules from other places. Does that mean that they’re going to be more and more dependent on tiers two and three, that is, those smaller firms that are funded by venture capital? Or are new compounds going to be coming out of India and China, that is, the generic drug companies using their profits to fund new compounds and molecules from that source?
In regards to the scientific perspective, a primary challenge will be doing more with less because there’s going to be less money available, and still pharma is going to want the same kind of productivity, or even better, than they’ve had in the past.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
The number one factor driving the development of tools and software for drug research is the intent for greater productivity. Because Symyx uses parallel experimentation, our tools tend to produce results faster and more productively than researchers achieve otherwise. They can run 100 or even 1,000 experiments quickly and get closer to optimization than possible with normal experimentation techniques. And with software, researchers can capture and extract the value of their scientific data – accessing information in real-time, cross calibrated with all kinds of other information. They can then mine and use this information in any number of ways.
In terms of areas for growth, the last 10 years have been a precursor for the next 10 years. In the last 10 years there’s been an incredible amount of research in small molecule development (polymorphs, crystallization and solubility). But as most of us are aware, the pharma companies are not growing at nearly the same rate between small and large molecules. So, where we’ve seen the evolution of parallel experimentation previously, what we’re likely going to see now is parallel experimentation used in large molecule development.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
Large pharma will spend 20 to 40 percent of what they’re currently spending on research with a large chunk devoted to contract research areas (CROs). For example, integrated workflows that give higher productivity and access to informatics worldwide, in real-time—dynamically changing how drug discovery and even process development is done. As it stands today, the standard CRO offering is not differentiated—it’s very much a commodity offering—and over the next ten years, that will change. When you add a parallel, micro-scale workflow with integrated informatics—allowing your customers to access data in near real-time as it is collected from instrumentation—you add value through increased productivity. To win over the next 5 to 10 years you’re going to have to add technology that dramatically improves productivity.
