Bio Logic

No business manager would query different departments to manually merge payroll deductions and sick-leave balances. Software can handle that. The multibillion-dollar field of biologics, which discovers and develops drugs synthesized from living organisms, has analogous demands but until recently no application to integrate and automate the myriad pieces of the process, from antibody or protein screening to drug production.

Genedata—a life sciences software company in Basel, Switzerland—says it has engineered a fix. The company announced earlier this year that it has developed a software system to manage the biological drug R&D process from start to finish. Called Genedata Biologics, the Oracle-based system also records the discovery history of compounds, enabling registration of promising new drugs.

Until now, even the largest pharmaceutical companies fended for themselves, sometimes with different labs and divisions building their own customized pieces of the data- and project-management system. "They did not have an integrated, out-of-the-box solution," says Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata. Handmade systems can be expensive to maintain, he adds, and there's "a lot of manual handover" that can cause big, costly headaches. Pfannes recalls the story of a technician from one lab sending a molecule with a 60-letter amino acid sequence to another lab. Nine months and many labor-hours later, the second lab discovered something amiss. It turned out that after the sequence was cut and pasted, a single letter was incorrect. He says Genedata Biologics would have flagged the mistake before the sequence went out the door.

To find out what researchers on the front lines of biologics needed, Genedata asked 350 scientists about their data over the past four years. "We collected all this information and built a data model," Pfannes says. That model emerged through collaborations with several biotech and pharmaceutical clients, including Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals.

Christoph Freiberg, senior scientist at Bayer and head of its Biologics Data Platform project, calls Genedata Biologics "a very valuable tool in our hands." Freiberg works with large teams across Germany and in San Francisco on big problems like screening for proteins that block receptors on cancer cells to halt disease. "We need a database system which enables us to store the relevant, key information for our compounds and to do sequence analysis and assay data analysis and combine all this," Freiberg says. "Biologic molecules are so complex. Even if you freeze and thaw a protein, you need to say this is a different batch from before, and you need to write it down, and the people doing the experiment need this information. It's not a trivial task when you have a division of labor."