Hello everyone,

can you believe, that it has already been three years since Xavo made the move from manufacturing into the field of Drug Discovery. I was part of that move and I like to recap what we have learnt so far and share with you the trends that I see coming towards Drug Discovery. Drug Discovery has seen massive improvements in automation in the past years. The throughput has increased significantly, but software solutions couldn’t really keep up. The same situation was seen in the process industry decades ago, and since then, more or less standardized processes (e.g. logistical processes) have been established by the industry.

These processes are in use for many years and could be improved during those years. We, as Xavo, are very familiar with those processes and 3 years ago, we started to bring them to Drug Discovery. With one of our customers, we were able to adapt them to Drug Discovery. We learnt that logistical processes are very similar, but there are fine distinctions to make between industry and lab. The success of the project has shown that we were right with our assumptions.

In my opinion, the processes of Sample Management in Drug Discovery will be getting closer to the industrial processes that are already out there. The level of automation and the amount of compounds are calling for it.

Collaboration between departments and/or sites will also become more and more important in the future since there will be specialized teams around the world. Those teams will be specializing on their core competency and provide it as a service to others. This service approach allows, for example, a scientist to order just compounds without even knowing how they need to be prepared or where they are prepared. For him, it is basically just like an online shop.

On the other hand, the Sample Management group can view and process all incoming orders more efficiently, because they only need to focus on their processes and they will have software to support those standardized processes. I think the future will be more service oriented and collaborative, and therefore, our services and products incorporate that.

I see following trends coming toward Drug Discovery:

• Collaboration within Drug Discovery and Drug Development

  The trend has already started since Sharepoint is used in more and more research facilities. I think collaboration will evolve even more during the next years. More and more collaborative processes and laboratories will be created that will foster the collaboration between internal and external facilities. The world of Drug Discovery will become more and more service oriented, due to the creation of compound preparation hubs, specialized research facilities and many more services.

• Standardization

  Standardization will bring more efficiency to the MAKE and TEST phase of Drug Discovery. Standardization will also foster innovation in the DESIGN and ANALYSIS phase, because departments or companies can focus on their core competency and not on interfaces and other setup work. We believe that standardization within Drug Discovery will lead to a revolution in this particular area, therefore we actively help developing standards, like interface standards, common commands and data capture standards. Xavo is founding member of the SiLA initiative (www.sila.coop), which is focused on developing this kind of standard.

I look forward to receiving your comments

Best regards
Thomas

COO at Xavo Systems