Expanded partnership between the companies provides a robust, Cloud-based system that accelerates and streamlines collaborative drug discovery for virtual teams
Accelrys, Inc., a leading scientific enterprise R&D software and services company, today announced its agreement with SCYNEXIS, Inc., to market and sell the SCYNEXIS Hit Explorer Operating System (HEOS) for comprehensive drug discovery information management. This reseller agreement is the next phase of the ongoing partnership between Accelrys and SCYNEXIS that is enabling a more efficient, streamlined drug discovery process.
The HEOS system, enabled by Accelrys applications, is a proven Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workspace that supports real-time data sharing across multiple organizations engaged in collaborative drug discovery.
“To accelerate innovation and reduce costs, drug discovery research organizations are increasingly externalizing projects across flexible partner networks comprised of other companies, academic collaborators and Contract Research Organizations,” said Frank Brown, PhD, senior vice president and chief science officer at Accelrys. “HEOS by SCYNEXIS optimizes the efficiency of these complex, multi-company networks by securing and partitioning intellectual property in the Cloud. The system facilitates real-time information sharing among multiple partners with minimal IT overhead and effort.”
In today’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, the trend towards increasingly externalized R&D is creating a new operating model with distinct data management challenges. Traditionally, in-house data management systems are not designed to support complex, multi-collaborator, multi-site networks. Workarounds such as exchanging data through email or uploading and transferring files jeopardize security and IP ownership. They also run the risk of introducing data errors and ambiguity and can lead to serious project management difficulties as collaboration networks expand and contract. From an IT perspective, manual data exchange does not support real-time data updates and also adds incremental IT costs associated with securing and monitoring internal systems for external use.
To address these challenges, HEOS by SCYNEXIS gives partnering organizations secure, real-time access to chemical registration, biological assay results, computational and visual analytics, safety assessment and pharmacokinetics data, and other project information in the Cloud. By enabling lead organizations to activate and deactivate partners quickly and securely without disrupting ongoing operations, the agile, configurable HEOS workspace supports an important new operating model for collaborating organizations that require secure, flexible information management and sharing with global reach.
“SCYNEXIS is pleased to partner with Accelrys in addressing the data management challenges inherent in multi-site, multi-collaborator drug discovery projects,” said Dr. Yves Ribeill, president and CEO of SCYNEXIS, Inc. “Accelrys’ worldwide presence and industry-leading Cheminformatics installed base will help drive broader dissemination of the proven HEOS system, which has already securely captured hundreds of thousands of compounds and millions of assay test results, supporting drug discovery research networks around the world.”
Fred Bost, SCYNEXIS’ HEOS manager, added, “This agreement builds on the successful integration of Accelrys software solutions such as Pipeline Pilot within the HEOS platform for the neglected disease community and will make a comprehensive Cloud solution available to the broader scientific community.”
During the past seven years, HEOS by SCYNEXIS has been proven in a broad range of global pharmaceutical and biotechnology programs, ranging from early discovery to preclinical projects. The system currently serves as the standard knowledge-sharing resource for a global network of more than 60 organizations studying neglected diseases.
This offering is now a key element within Accelrys’ recently-announced Cheminformatics Suite of software applications. To learn more about the HEOS collaboration workspace, join us for our upcoming webinar: “Introducing HEOS® by SCYNEXIS—a Cloud-based Collaborative Drug Discovery Workspace” on Nov. 3.