Axxam社、Genedata Screenerでハイスループットスクリーニングサービスを強化

Leading contract research and discovery organization capitalizes on Genedata Screener flexibility to tailor data analysis for customer-specific screening and hit-to-lead services

December 5, 2011
Basel, Switzerland

Genedata, a leading provider of advanced software solutions for drug discovery and life science research, today announced Axxam is advancing its high-throughput screening services with Genedata Screener^®. Axxam, a leading contract research and discovery company, focuses on collaborative research programs for the life science industry. With Genedata Screener’s flexible configuration capabilities and rich APIs, Axxam is able to tailor its high-throughput screening to specific discovery processes and effectively address challenging targets and multi-client/project research on a single platform. The system’s high-performance data analysis across the entire screening cascade supports Axxam’s early-stage therapeutic discoveries in different therapeutics areas.

“Axxam analyzes data produced by screening cellular or biochemical assays, based on fluorescence or luminescence readouts,” explained Dr. Michela Stucchi, head of Screening Technologies at Axxam.  “As a discovery company, we work frequently on projects with challenging targets. Therefore, we demand a flexible high-throughput screening solution that can be easily used by researchers throughout our organization. Genedata Screener provides that flexibility while streamlining and simplifying complex assays. Moreover, users with basic skills can easily load and analyze data for a fast quality check. The solution has become an indispensable tool and the software of choice for our daily analysis. Furthermore, Genedata Screener functionality accelerates the hit-to-lead process, which optimizes researchers’ time and Axxam resources.”

Currently, Axxam uses three of Genedata Screener’s five screening modules, including:

• Assay Analyzer imports and automatically processes data from all screening instruments using pre-defined protocols. Axxam researchers routinely process high-throughput screening campaigns with multiple runs of 100 x 384-well plates each, review results globally, and can interactively refine the processing and outlier masking with Assay Analyzer. Axxam reports that Assay Analyzer’s sophisticated algorithms and statistical tools accelerate the hit selection process for small and high-scale experiments.
• Condoseo fits thousands of dose-response curves, allowing Axxam to quickly and consistently optimize fitting procedures for large compound sets. Built-in algorithms for automated outlier masking and heuristics for model selection ensure high-quality results. Graphical overviews, which show global potency distribution and highlight quality issues, enable Axxam to take immediate action. All centrally-stored results can be exported as reports.
• Hit Profiler automatically imports thousands of biological results for compounds, including activities or potencies, from different data sources and displays them in a compound-centric table. Specialized viewers display dose-response curves and chemical structures while fast filters support efficient identification of interesting compound sets. Axxam typically loads results of entire datasets or a compound subset for fast data comparison.

Balanced Computational Platform Drives Low Total Cost of Ownership
Genedata Screener’s classic three-tier architecture (client-server-database) promotes a competitive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in Axxam IT infrastructure. The architecture ensures high performance, scalability, and minimal maintenance costs as client updates, system configurations, and customer-specific integrations are handled on the central server. Genedata Screener is built on modern software engineering principles that distribute the workload onto client machines while using the server for serving data and methods and load balancing. This results in a balanced computational platform with a relatively low-cost hardware layer, which contributes to low TCO. Low TCO is further realized with “Genedata’s highly qualified technical support team and the system’s speed, reliability, and flexibility,” continued Dr. Stucchi.

“It’s highly gratifying to see that Axxam has successfully implemented Genedata Screener into their high-throughput screening services and that Genedata Screener has become integral to Axxam’s commitment to achieving and exceeding customer expectations in target discovery,” noted Dr. Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata. “We want to extend Genedata Screener’s value beyond the top 50 pharmas and into CROs. Therefore, Axxam’s adoption of Genedata Screener is an important milestone in our product strategy, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with Axxam in advancing discovery in pharmaceutical, agrichemical, and flavor fields.”