TransForm has made a very sizeable investment in our informatics capabilities, as these are what make our high-throughput crystallization and formulations platforms “smart.” Our informatics experts have designed software applications and data management backbones for telecommunications firms, financial services giants and genomics companies, and have such diverse backgrounds as biochemistry, data warehousing, engineering and astrophysics.
Informatics pervades every aspect of TransForm’s approach to form & formulation discovery and improvement, from computer-assisted design of experiment, to robotic control, to sample tracking and data capture, to data mining and analysis.
“Smart” design of experiment. Our scientists have an array of software tools to help them custom-design the appropriate series of combinatorial experiments for each API and/or research challenge. They can choose from a variety of combinatorial programs, as well as draw upon relevant information such as chemical structure and chemical descriptor diversity. For formulation discovery, our experimental design further enables us to ensure that all excipients are used within pharmaceutically acceptable levels as well as other customizable bounds, and to explore the experimental space in a variety of different ways.
Data modeling and mining. TransForm has also developed a suite of modeling and data mining applications to help us gain knowledge and insight from our unprecedented exploration of form and formulation space. Our discovery informatics specialists can explore and visualize our large data sets in multi-dimensional space, to evaluate component interactions and detect and begin to understand unforeseen synergies between chemical components. Each of our partners benefits from the fact that we are able to look for such insights not just within related series of experiments, but also across other historically generated data collected on diverse compounds. Over time, we believe that this growing data set will provide TransForm with unique insight into structural features can affect crystallization as well as solubility enhancement through formulation.
Data security. Our partners’ trust is vital to us. We treat others’ proprietary data as carefully as we do our own. It is only accessible to authorized personnel, and is separated by rigorous internal firewalls.
Integration with partners. We believe that difficult problems are best solved through close collaboration and frequent communication between our scientists and our partners. With one of our partners, we have already established a virtual private network to enable their scientists to view experimental data and results on their compounds as soon as we have posted them. Our data warehouse, moreover, has been designed to facilitate integration with other information resident in the databases of partner companies. And we are designing all of our informatics systems to enable compliance with applicable U.S. regulations governing the data controls necessary for developing pharmaceutical products.