Partnering with ChemAxon: What it Means to IDBS

Historically, IDBS developed its own chemistry technology internally, which was successfully used to support our E‑WorkBook chemistry ELN and ActivityBase screening platform. When transitioning to the web, we reviewed our approach and chose to partner with ChemAxon, who were able to provide us with an easy-to-use solution for web chemistry. This technology included the web drawing tool Marvin JS and the indexing service JChem.

Collaboration with ChemAxon is not new to us – in the E‑WorkBook desktop electronic laboratory notebook product, we already leveraged the Reactor technology for enumeration of parallel synthesis, and calculator plugins for physicochemical property and IUPAC nomenclature predictions.

To promote our strategic partnership, our chemistry product management team regularly visit the ChemAxon team in Budapest, where we have face-to-face discussions to investigate each other’s product roadmaps and requirements, doing deep-dives into technical details for APIs and web services to faciliate integration. In addition to this, we have a regular biweekly catch up where both teams can discuss progress and key dependencies.

So, is this partnership working? Absolutely! Whilst ChemAxon teams concentrate on structure drawing, rendering and storage of chemical structures and reactions, at IDBS we are able to focus on bringing these technologies to the foreground through the E‑WorkBook chemistry informatics tools and workflows to support organic chemists in discovery chemistry, process chemistry and industrial research.

This partnership is continually evolving, as ChemAxon have many valuable tools that we think will be beneficial to our customers. As an example, we are currently looking at close integration between our new web-enabled chemistry ELN and ChemAxon’s chemical compound registration tool, to provide a complete workflow to our customers.