Efficient biomolecular structural data handling and analysis [Event highlights]
Around one-third of all FDA-approved drugs in the past 5 years are biologics. This trend continues to evolve in years to come since more and more new biotech companies focus their development on the biological drugs.
In fact, the rational design of those new biologic drugs is greatly aided by the constant advancements in technologies that reveal complex biomolecular structures (read our latest blog on Five fast growing techniques in structural biology and their impact on drug discovery). At the same time, however, there is a high demand among drug researchers for efficient data handling and analysis.
To support the discovery of next-generation biologic drugs, Discngine and ChemAxon decided to collaborate through a strategic partnership that aims to enable researchers to overcome the challenges in complex structural data management and speed up the rational biologics design. After officially announcing the partnership beginning this year, experts from both companies came together in a joint event to further explain the benefits of this collaboration - both technical and scientific.
Event highlights
1 - Data management challenges
Márk Somogyi, Product Manager at Chemaxon, explained that: “There is a tremendous amount of data management challenges ahead for the already established informatics systems”, such as:
To understand the biological and chemical structure context to a sufficient extent to combine the knowledge coming from both fields
Excel spreadsheets create data siloes and make the entire R&D process less efficient and productive.
Increasing complexity of biomolecules due to the continuously increasing amount of chemical space, which means that scientists need to spend more time designing structures
2 - Beyond small molecule universe towards biologics as a team
The 3decision platform is already storing, categorizing, and analyzing protein and small molecules data in a centralized knowledge base. It allows scientists for multidisciplinary teams to get easy access to structural knowledge and drive ideation and decision making.
3decision Interface - structure collection (left), 3D Viewer (right)
With the addition of ChemAxon components, its capabilities will extend to a higher level. Namely, scientists will be able to additionally register, superpose, visualize and edit peptides and antibodies. The new features will be used to facilitate the design of both small molecules as well as biologics.
Moreover, with the structural data avalanche, it became harder than ever before to communicate seamlessly around data and make meaningful decisions. Peter Schmidtke, 3decision Product Manager, further explained that the functionalities in 3decision are adapted for the collaborative work within drug discovery teams. 3decision gives computational chemists, medicinal chemist, and structural biologist a common ground to efficiently generate ideas, easily share their work and quickly analyze results.
3 - Integration of multiple technologies to make the best of each
3decision backend architecture
The integration of both 3decision and Chemaxon technologies will be leveraged through a fully rearchitectured 3decision backend. This full revamp allows now to easily plugin in new microservices within 3decision. The Chemaxon’s components for sketching (MarvinJS), search (Choral) and standardization and property calculation (JChemWebservices) of atoms/molecules that are outside the biology scope are already in the process of integration while the biomolecule toolkit is in the pipeline at the moment.
To learn more about collaboration and future opportunities, access the recording and slides here.
The second joint event is tentatively planned for the next quarter! Follow us on social media for more info