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.
Synaptic Science LLC
Headquarters
Rockville, Md.
Years in Drug Research
2 Years
Web site
About the company
Synaptic Science is a bioinformatics software solution provider whose products are for everyone with a stake in early stage drug discovery; small molecule R&D teams who must collaborate across scientific disciplines; project leads and management who triage competing drug candidate; CROs who provide outsourcing to R&D teams and academic research centers who identify many lead compounds.
Synaptic Science’s primary product, SEURAT, provides a collaborative environment for the efficient performance of the day-to-day query, analysis, visualization, reporting, and workflow activities of chemists, biologists and preclinical project groups.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Companies such as this did not exist 10 years ago. Teams performing drug design were doing so in an ad hoc manner supported by an unwieldy mixture of vendor products and home-grown software tools. Over the past 10 years, processes have matured and the amount of data to be analyzed has exploded yet few pharmas have been successful in creating effective in-house tools to address productivity. The cost in time and money to do so is extremely high. It makes business sense for pharmas to buy tools that address their needs out of the box if they exist.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
The era of High-Throughput Screening (HTS) brought with it the promise of a great increase in the rate of new drug discovery. But this promise is yet to be fulfilled. HTS, combinatorial chemistry and in-silico techniques have significantly increased the rate of data production but has not produced a commensurate increase in the discovery of new drugs. As one of our customers has observed, the discovery informatics community needs to ask itself two key questions. First, are we curating a garbage dump of data whose utility for drug discovery has come and gone? Second, how can we provide value above and beyond that which the project lead who has mastered the literature around their target and top lead series already provides? The challenge then is to move from a preoccupation on data to one of supporting scientists in their decision making processes.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
The past ten years have been dominated by advances in High-Throughput Screening (HTS). As a result, enormous amounts of data can be generated quickly and cheaply and in a much more reproducible manner. While the development of tools for the production of data has advanced bringing with it an explosion in outsourcing of chemistry and biology, tools for the consumption of data (such as decision support) and for easing the collaboration challenge created by outsourcing have lagged. Researchers are now sitting on enormous piles of data and are facing the daunting dual challenge of trying to find needles in haystacks and coordinating the efforts on in-house and outsourced project teams. Synaptic Science creates products to address both of these gaps.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
The next 10 years will likely see a shift in focus from the data to focus back on the scientists. With the scientists as the central focus of drug design and discovery, the technology and tools will adapt to them rather than vice-versa. This will result in:
- Advances in decision support tools
- More off-the-shelf tools
- More “one stop” vendor products that reach all the way from instruments data capture to early stage preclinical work.
- Software vendor support for the streamlined exchange of data between companies and their CRO’s / CRAMS.
- More scientist-centered integrated tool frameworks such as Synaptic Science SEURAT
