Building an Informatics Bridge

Image: Courtesy of Accelrys Screenshot of DS ViewerPro Researchers routinely have at their disposal a variety of sophisticated software tools to help them analyze data and make decisions, but communicating results across disciplines and promoting collaborations between scientists can be a challenge. San Diego-based Accelrys aims to bridge this communications gap with its Discovery Studio™ line of software products, a horizontal information management system for the life sciences. Scott Kahn, general manager and senior vice president at Accelrys, explains that Discovery Studio is designed to "break down barriers that are caused by the unique ways the different groups of scientists look at problems, and make that a strength rather than a hurdle." The suite is comprised of an integrated series of software products, each designed for a specific function and linked to a central database. Programs include DS Gene, a Windows-compatible sequence-analysis application based on Accelrys' MacVector and OMIGA products; DS MedChem Explorer, a cheminformatics tool; and DS ViewerPro, a three-dimensional molecular visualization application. The most recent additions to the product line, the Accord Enterprise Informatics suite and SeqStore 3.0, include a set of software products for chemical and biological database integration, sequence information management, and assay and protocol storage. Upcoming releases include DS Modeling, a protein modeling application. To illustrate the Discovery Studio approach, Kahn describes a laboratory in which chemists develop small molecules to interact with specific biological targets identified by a group of biologists. In this situation, the two groups typically work independently, but Discovery Studio offers a more interactive, integrated ap-proach, explains Kahn. "Discovery Studio allows the biologists to work with DS Gene to do the sequence analysis, to develop a knowledge base around that target and put it into a project database that the chemists can then pick up, so that when they develop their chemistry and are making their decisions about chemistry, they can see a more rich description of what the target is," says Kahn. Chemists can use DS MedChem Explorer to understand the relationship between the target and the chemistry and then put this information in the database for biologists to access when they choose their next target. Scientists and project managers can use DS ViewerPro to create meeting and conference presentations. The project database thus serves as a central repository that can be accessed by the particular software tools used by individual scientists. "You can facilitate communications across disciplines simply by letting [these] tools access identical information, and display and communicate it in ways that are appropriate for the specific audience," Kahn says. Discovery Studio represents a change from traditional approaches to knowledge management, says Kahn. "People today put their results on the C drives of their computers, and that's the way they've worked on a computer for the last 20 years." But companies are beginning to realize the advantages of working with more centralized data storage. Accelrys recently announced a collaboration with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies in which Agilent will license Accelrys' ViewerActiveX Control three-dimensional visualization software in the development of its Synapsia Informatics Workbench, a suite of horizontal information management tools for drug discovery that permits scientists from different disciplines to share their findings through a set of integrated software applications. "The Synapsia Informatics Workbench allows you to tie information from multiple disciplines, visualize it, synthesize it, and link it back to your scientific assumptions," explains François Mandeville, Agilent's business manager for informatics solutions. The licensing agreement is only the beginning of a collaborative relationship with Accelrys that, Mandeville says, will lead to further integration of Discovery Studio tools into the Synapsia system. Mandeville adds that collaboration between companies like Agilent and Accelrys is a business model that is gaining popularity in the bioinformatics industry. "Until now most of the companies in the industry were pitching themselves as being the one-stop shopping place ... Unfortunately if you look at the challenges of the entire informatics industry, there's too much for any one company to try to provide on its own," he says. "So the companies that will succeed are companies that consciously choose to team up with other companies and integrate their respective strengths." --Aileen Constans

Building an Informatics Bridge

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