March 27, 2020
by Andrew Anderson, Vice President of Innovation & Information, ACD/Labs
The global implications of COVID-19 are affecting all of us. We understand that many of our customers, partners, and peers may be facing new challenges due to current person-to-person contact restrictions that prohibit or limit tasks being conducted in a physical laboratory. To help minimize productivity losses and make your time working away from the lab/office more constructive, we pulled together a quick guide that covers how a variety of our software solutions can be used to support scientists’ workflows remotely.
Firstly, the following steps should help you with getting access to your ACD/Labs software:
- Use Remote Desktop to access your computer in the lab or office.
- Benefit from complimentary license expansion to support employees working from home (for software under maintenance)
- Enable enterprise data and knowledge sharing, or silent automation to pull analytical data directly from instruments.
Remote Data Accessibility
- ACD/Spectrus Processor and a variety of Workbooks can be used by remote scientists to import, process, interpret, and report analytical data and results to keep moving the experimental lifecycle forward.
- Tip: for our customers embarking on “cloud utilization” strategy for their laboratory, the Spectrus knowledgebase can enhance these strategies for analytical data. Silent automation and unattended instrument monitoring, data processing, and transfer-to-cloud data marshalling are all supported by various Spectrus Platform subsystems.
- The ACD/Spectrus Platform can also be used to connect “externalized” data sources to corporate cloud sites, and even experimental analytical data—collected by CxO laboratories—can be streamed into the Spectrus Platform.
For Drug Development Project Decision Support:
- Luminata, available via workstation and browser-based interface, can allow for the contextually relevant organization of CMO/CRO/corporate data across the product development lifecycle and across the internal and external development ecosystem.
- Remote scientists can also use Luminata’s wide variety of decision-support features to make critical project decisions in one single interface, removing the need to access multiple systems and locations for decision-enabling data.
For Chromatographers’ Workflows:
- ACD/AutoChrom allows chromatographers to design method development strategies without running an experiment. For seamless method parameter setting and execution, our application allows for direct instrument connections. In this mode, remote colleagues can initiate QbD-directed screening experiments, and perform automated processing and method suitability assessment, all remotely.
- Users can also use the results from screening experiments to build effective simulations that predict chromatographic outcomes with reasonable certainty.
For DMPK Scientists’ Workflows:
- MetaSense can help store and retrieve metabolic information and build comprehensive biotransformation maps for prospective drug candidates across the pharmaceutical R&D lifecycle. Remote scientists can comprehensively characterize acquired in-vitro and in-vivo incubation experimental LC/MS datasets.
- It also provides DMPK scientists with remote processing and analysis of LC/MS data from most major instrument vendor formats and helps to reduce the manual effort necessary to prepare biotransformation maps.
- Finally, MetaSense also allows users to build interactive, searchable database repositories.
For Medicinal Chemists’ Workflows:
- ACD/Percepta can serve as a useful tool to support a variety of medicinal chemistry use cases, and predict lead series property dynamics using Percepta’s R-group substitution functionality. These two features allow remote users to design synthesis targets, even while away from the laboratory.
- The Percepta Platform can also be deployed via desktop, browser-based, or even functionality-as-a-service, where prediction modules can be embedded into existing corporate web applications.
For Automated, Parallel, and High Throughput Experimentation:
- Katalyst D2D gives remote scientists the ability to prepare their experimental design, physical experiment layouts, experiment procedures, and experiment sampling and analysis instructions. From there, scientists can submit exportable instruction lists to the appropriate automation software interfaces or prepare human-readable instruction lists for onsite colleagues to execute.
- Upon completion of experiments and analysis, Katalyst D2D also allows remote scientists to access all data across the high-throughput experiment lifecycle.
While we are hopeful that the current global efforts to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak are effective in the coming days, weeks, and months, we recognize the importance of preparing and implementing new risk mitigation strategies remotely.
You can find more information on each tip in our white paper, accessible here, and in our various upcoming webinars, listed here. We welcome you to share these resources with your team too so we can all accomplish critical tasks, collaborate, and be productive together, even while apart.
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