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February 1999

Cambridge Consultants Limited is working with Synomics and Muscat to find meaning in pharma data

Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL®), Synomics Ltd and Muscat have signed an agreement to co-operate in the provision of advanced information technology solutions for drug discovery.

Together, CCL, Synomics and Muscat are building solutions that will enable organisations to maximise the return from their research expenditure and increase the flow of new drugs in the discovery pipeline.

CCL's work in the application of intelligent software agents is key to automating the relationships between data and those who might wish to use it, and hence, radically reduces the research time in the drug discovery process.

Synomics brings an intimate understanding of the research process. Its Framework for Research Informatics enables the integration of diverse scientific information stored in a variety of database systems.

Muscat is bringing linguistic inference information retrieval technology to the package. By understanding the meaning of documents it offers unrivalled power to the search and retrieval capabilities of the solutions now being offered.

The pharmaceutical industry's investment in new technologies, such as high throughput screening (HTS), combinatorial chemistry and genomics, is generating large quantities of valuable data. This data is proving to be a rich source of research targets and potential drug compounds.

However, as the cost of bringing a drug to market is $350m, and rising, the pharmaceutical industry is now under significant pressure to reduce its research costs and increase the rate at which new drugs are developed. Consequently, the industry is seeking new ways of using data to guide their research process, and make informed decisions about which potential targets merit investigation.

'The benefits of knowledge management systems have been already realized in other industries. The rapidly changing nature of the pharmaceutical industry means that companies stand to gain significant commercial advantage from using our systems' said Viv Hughes, Associate Director of CCL.

This collaboration enables pharma companies to exploit in-house knowledge. 'Thought experiments' can be conducted within and across projects in a much reduced time and, hence, at lower cost than previously imaginable. Decision support tools automate complex but structured tasks, freeing scientists to concentrate on the intellectually challenging part of their jobs.

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