Chemical Information Bulletin, Volume 52, Number 2, Fall 2000 Page: 32
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Formulation sounds easy. Take well-known
ingredients and mix them to make something with
better properties or performance. Make a tablet that's
stable under air contact and room temperature. Make
a cough mixture that costs less than existing
formulas, but still tastes great. Deliver a new drug in
a comfortable fashion that delivers the same dose
every time, with few side effects. If this still seems
straightforward, did your tablet just get too large for
patient comfort? Or if your intermediate materials get
stuck in a railway yard are they likely to turn to
concrete? Can you make varieties of your anti-asthma
mixture to match preferences in different continents?
A number of trends in the pharmaceuticals industry
magnify these problems. Leading companies run
global operations in global markets, so formulators
must respond to diverse customer-bases and
collaborate with colleagues worldwide. Intense
competitive pressures mean that more products must
be generated faster. Trial-and-error is becoming an
even less secure basis for competitive advantage.
This role of accelerating and supporting the complex
task of pharmaceutical formulation can be performed
using software tools. Creating such a system needs
existing technology to be creatively applied and
extended. Its applications will cut across a wide range
of products and industries, and provide significant
competitive advantages to early-adopters, yet core
requirements for the system can be established with
no sharing of proprietary information. It calls for a
synthesis of software, systems, and scientific skills
not available in many companies. These are the ideal
ingredients for a pre-competitive consortium. The
industry-academic-software vendor consortium
approach will help to accelerate and determine the
best way to combine and implement technologies to
maximize their impact on these commercially
significant problems. Member organizations typically
join for three-year periods. Membership entitles
researchers to use the consortium software, provide
input to software development, attend regular
meetings where ideas are shared with peers, receive
dedicated application support, and gain early access
to new technology. This talk will cover the aspects of
the rise of the consortium approach as well as
discussing the evolution of software modeling into
decision support tools in a client server environment.
1:35 - Garbage in - results out: Name
normalization in ChemFinder.com searching. Louis
J. Culot Jr., and Ni Yan, Informatics,
CambridgeSoft Corporation, 100 Cambridge Park
Drive, Cambridge, MA 02215, lculot@camsoft.com
Despite a large scientific audience, many of
ChemFinder.Com's search requests are ill formed,and would not match standard chemical names /
synonyms. Text matching, even against exhaustive
synonym lists, will not yield matches using standard
text-matching algorithms. While the computer is
unforgiving, most scientists can readily defer the
intended query and intelligently suggest results.
Through the use of name and query normalization,
CambridgeSoft has dramatically improved the quality
of search results for poorly-formed queries. By preprocessing
the stored chemical names, while
preserving the full molecular meaning, and by
likewise normalizing the queries, we were able to
yield a significant increase in the success rate.
2:05 - Merging disparate chemical information
sources. Louis J. Culot Jr., and Irwin Schreiman,
Informatics, CambridgeSoft Corporation, 100
Cambridge Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02215,
lculot@camsoft.com
Chemical information exists in a variety of formats
and sources: Robust and well-checked databases,
small group databases, Excel spreadsheets and Word
documents, and so forth. In building the ChemACX
database (a comprehensive chemical sourcing
database), we encountered virtually every sort and
quality of chemical information. Two approaches are
commonly used in managing disparate data sources:
merging the data, and building data-searching
applications which combine queries and results. We
explore the applications for both approaches, and
focus on good practices for merging data. By
applying consistent rules, using data sources as
quality controls, and developing an algorithm for
merging the data, the resultant database was better
checked and of higher quality than the input data, and
was built in a highly-automated way. We also
maintain a high degree of original data integrity, and
provide mechanisms for updates and distribution.
2:35 - ACS Library and Information Center:
Evolving from a collection to a service. Svetla P.
Baykoucheva, ACS Library and Information Center,
American Chemical Society, 1155 Sixteenth St., NW,
Washington, DC 20036, Fax: 202-872-6257,
s_baykouchev@acs.org
The role of the ACS Library and Information Center
(previously, ACS Library Services) has dramatically
changed. In addition to performing all typical library
duties, the ACS Library is now offering many new
services. These include a New Digital Imaging
Center; publishing the ACS newsletter; staff training;
serving the public through the Chemical Health &
Safety Referral Service; providing a content-rich
chemical information on the ACS Web page
(http://www.acs.org/infocenter.html); andCHEMICAL INFORMATION BULLETIN
32
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American Chemical Society. Division of Chemical Information. Chemical Information Bulletin, Volume 52, Number 2, Fall 2000, periodical, Autumn 2000; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5630/m1/34/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .