Closing the gap between centralized and decentralized compound management approaches.

The demand for organized storage concepts to maintain, collect and distribute compounds has grown not only at pharmaceutical companies, but also at smaller research organizations and academic laboratories where there is the demand to store and retrieve substances systematically. However, budget limitations have prevented these smaller groups from buying costly storage systems offered by specialized commercial vendors. On the other hand, within pharmaceutical companies a need for inexpensive and flexible storage concepts has developed and complements the existing automated archives. For reasons of efficiency, most companies have built centralized facilities holding large collections of internal medicinal chemistry compounds to assist various, globally distributed research programs. This standardization and centralization though is not always ideal for a global organization. Therefore, site specific and localized requirements need to be addressed to ensure quick on site access to compounds without losing the global accessibility to them. In this article, we describe an approach towards a low cost and highly flexible store concept with manual compound stores of variable design addressing local needs, created to complement the existing automated stores. A key component of our implementation is the Compound Store Manager software which is capable of administering the different global stores. The developed backend system and centralized data management facilitates the operation and integration of the stores into an existing store environment.

Compound Hub: efficiency gains through innovative sample management processes.

While significant investments are made across the industry and increasingly also in academia to enhance or build a compound file, the efficient sourcing of compounds from in-house medical chemistry is frequently seen as a challenge. This article introduces the Compound Hub strategy developed at the Novartis Compound Archive. Central Compound Hubs in Basel and Cambridge were combined with web-based ordering of compounds and assays, providing assay-ready, solubilized samples to labs anywhere in the global research organization. Relieving scientists from time-intensive sample preparation tasks, error rates could be reduced through electronic processing and tracking of compounds/assays and the capture of medicinal chemistry compounds for the compound library could be increased by 75%.