Company Announcements

ELN company labfolder announced its selection to participate in Merck KGaA’s Accelerator program. As a result, it will benefit from support, coaching and consulting. The company has 20 employees.

In September, Kyowa Hakko Kirin joined Certara’s Simcyp Consortium and licensed the Simcyp Population-based Simulator. Kyowa Hakko Kirin is the 36^th biopharmaceutical company and 11^th Japanese pharmaceutical company to join the Consortium.

Synthace announced in September that it raised $9.6 million in Series A funding. Its Antha language and software platform for biology is designed to make reproducible and scalable workflows that can be readily edited and shared, and easily automated on labs’ existing equipment.

In October, Elsevier announced the donation of its Unified Data Model (UDM) XML file format to the Pistoia Alliance, a nonprofit organization developing standards and best practices for sharing research. The UDM will now be developed and extended under the stewardship of the Pistoia Alliance, with the ultimate aim of publishing an open and freely available format for the storage and exchange of drug discovery data. The inaugural version of the extended UDM will be published in the first quarter of 2018.

Cheminformatics firm Optibrium announced in October that it will join the five-year, €40 million ($44 million) Enhancing Translational Safety Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management (eTRANSAFE) project, a European collaboration to improve safety assessment across the drug discovery and development process. The membership consists of 8 academic institutes, 6 small and medium-sized enterprises, and 12 pharmaceutical companies.

Product Introductions

In September, RowAnalytics launched Synomics Studio, a multi-SNP association platform for large-scale genome population studies. It identifies and validates sets of genomic, phenotypic and clinical factors that, in specific combinations, are strongly associated with disease risk, disease protective effects and therapy response. It is part of the precision.life product suite.

Genedata debuted in September its Early Access Program to Deep Learning for High Content Screening image analysis, a deep learning technology using convolutional neural networks to automatically analyze microscopy images in high throughput. Benefits include reduced classification time and unbiased image analysis.

In September, Global Specimen Solutions released the LabCODE LIMS, featuring pre-built capabilities for biobanking, pharmacokinetics, pharmacogenetics, NGS, flow cytometry, pathology and others.  It is fully integrated with the company’s GlobalCODE pipeline data management tool.

Benchling unveiled in September its Workflow & Release Management system, a new class of informatics software that organizes, optimizes and measures experimental progress from discovery to bioprocessing for any biologics modality.

In September, OnRamp Bioinformatics launched the Rosalind platform, which enables researchers performing large-scale genomics studies across a range of fields (including drug development, precision medicine and agri-business) to rapidly and dynamically explore and interpret their own data.

Certara introduced Phoenix 8.0 pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamics and toxicokinetic modeling and simulation software. New features include support of grid computing to reduce model run time and a distributed delay function. The software is currently used by 60,000 researchers.

Orders/Sales of Note

In September, Genedata announced the extension of its licensing agreement with Axxam, a Partner Research Organization, for its Genedata Screener platform. Axxam has used the platform since 2008.