Company Announcements

ACD/Labs announced in March the filing of a copyright infringement suit against Mestrelab Research in Barcelona, Spain. The lawsuit asserts that ACD/Labs’ proprietary software source code was directly incorporated into Mestrelab’s MNova IUPAC Name software. According to ACD/Labs, MestreLab Research’s management was notified repeatedly about the concern but refused to acknowledge the possible infringement prior to the court filing.

In May, CAMO Software named Raman Bhatnagar as CEO, replacing Shirley Henshall. Most recently he was director of Strategic Projects at Intrum/Lindorff, a credit management services company.

Genedata announced in May that that the Genedata Screener platform has become the first in­vitro screening data analysis platform for a new biotech infrastructure initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-­based Biotech Quick Start program. AWS Biotech Quick Start is designed to provide an enterprise­-grade research environment in the cloud, based on best practices and integrated with leading life science solutions.

In May, Lab7 Systems changed its name to L7 Informatics and named Vasudev Rangadass, PhD, as CEO. Prior to Lab7 Systems, Dr. Rangadass was chief strategy officer at NantHealth. L7 Informatics’s Enterprise Science Platform is a scientific process and data management system.

L7 Informatics announced in May a connector to the Microsoft Genomics service on the Azure cloud for L7’s Enterprise Science Platform.

In May, Schrödinger established a collaboration with Canada’s National Centre for Drug Research and Development to develop novel immuno-oncology monoclonal antibodies and other cancer biologics. Schrödinger will support hit triage, prioritization through prediction of physico-chemical liabilities and antibody humanization. The initial project will involve an immune checkpoint target that is present on cancer stem cells.

In June, Benchling, the data management and collaboration platform for life sciences research, closed a $14.5 million Series B funding round, led by Benchmark. More than 100,000 scientists across enterprises and academia use Benchling. Customers that have standardized on its platform include Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Incyte, Editas Medicine, Agenus, Zymergen and Obsidian Therapeutics.

Elucidata announced in June that it raised $1.7 million in seed funding. The financing round was led by Hyperplane Venture Capital. Elucidata’s drug discovery platform for -omics data is at the intersection of computational biology, software engineering, modeling, machine learning, statistics, and design.

In June, Labstep, a platform for researchers that captures real-time scientific data and connects lab groups enabling information sharing and reproducibility, announced that it raised £1 million ($758,000) in funding. The company plans to double its staff to 12. Labstep has users at over 600 universities including, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, University College London, Imperial College, King’s College and the Crick Institute.

Product Introductions

In May, Amazon Web Service introduced Amazon Neptune, a fully managed graph database service. Applications include drug discovery. Amazon Neptune is available in North Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Ireland regions, and will expand to additional regions in the coming year.

In June, Genedata released the Genedata Expressionist 12.0 enterprise software solution offering integrated data management, processing, analysis, and reporting for MS-based characterization of biotherapeutics and related applications in proteomics and metabolomics. New features include the applications of metadata that can directly apply specific parameters to individual MS data sets and optional cloud deployment.

Schrödinger introduced in June a 2D coordinate generation tool to the RDKit open source cheminformatics toolkit. In addition, Schrödinger utilized the RDKit to develop an open source GPU-enabled similarity search tool.

In June, Simulations Plus released version 9 of its ADMET Predictor AI modeling program. New features include additional pharmacokinetic endpoint predictions as part of the high-throughput pharmacokinetics simulations module.

Sales and Orders of Note

In May, Biomax Informatics’ client Royal DSM signed a multi-year license for the Biomax to implement a new enterprise knowledge platform.

In June, Germany’s Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena selected ACD/Labs’ ACD/Spectrus Processor, ACD/NMR Workbook Suite, and ACD/MS Workbook Suite to advance its analytical data management strategy in the Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Science.

LabArchives announced in new enterprise partnership in June with the University of Oxford for its ELN and also obtained a site license.