According to a recently released report by Zinnov Management Consulting, India’s R&D globalization and services market is set to double by 2020 to US$ 38 billion. Despite the sanguine vista that the report showcases, it cannot be denied that the Pharmaceutical Industry is at a pivotal point in its evolution, particularly in the Research and Development arena. The patent on many of the medicines launched in the 1990's will expire over the next few years, leaving many companies exposed where only four out of ten companies will have enough products in their pipelines to fill the impending revenue gap. To cope with this situation, companies will have to come with liberal and pioneering medical solutions through innovative R&D. Understanding this changing scenario faced by the pharmaceutical companies, ACD/Labs, headquartered in Canada, has created solutions to cater to these needs and have made a landmark in enabling R&Ds for Drug development and chemical innovation. ‘Unified Laboratory Intelligence’; ULI by ACD/Labs is a technology framework to collect and unify chemical, structured and analytical data that enables the scientists to search, retrieve and reapply ‘live’ data throughout the research and development process. As a result of which they can make better decisions about chemical identification, its characterization, thereby hinting at accelerated development and cost reduction. As ULI follows a universal format in sharing information from various departments it eliminates the hassle of PDF document storage. ACD’s Open Access Laboratory Solution ensures thereby invoking accountability. As a testimony to this, a CRO (Contract Research Organization)in China is using thousands of licenses of ACD/Labs ’ tools on their chemists’ desktop and have experienced anassuaging result.

Enabling battle against Chemical Impurities
For the past two decades, ACD/Labs have been indulging itself in addressing some of the elemental challenges faced by the pharmaceutical domain, specifically the challenge related to dealing with impurities. ACD provides solutions that effectively identify these impurities, isolate these using efficient methods, characterizing them structurally and then profiling them. Additionally, the solution also evaluates them for genotoxicity thereby providing a comprehensive knowledge pool around these impurities. ACD/Labs’ bequest to scientists, Spectrus, enables them to systematically approach these challenges while increasing productivity and efficiency significantly. “We acknowledge that in pharmaceutical industry, competition isn’t simply about price but the quality of the products and the speed at which these products get to the market. We have been able to resolve the issue of heterogeneity between the several data-types and several brands for creation and then conservation ofknowledge; which makes us the only provider to offer the required information from the magnitude of data that they are faced with for decades” adds K K Bhagchandani.

Fostering Asian strength in chromatography
Historically, Asia has been leading with their expertise and experience in chromatography or method development; however there were some gaps in systematic approaches and some practices. With the mandate by FDA around QbD there is a clear need to bridge these gaps and rise to occasion. Unlike other offerings in the market ACD/Labs has created a solution by integrating chemical intelligence with statistics & simulation to help users comply by the principles of QbD. The solution is designed to guide the users to follow a systematic-approach and hence make the right decisions for developing best HPLC methods. The chemical intelligence built into the solution lays the ground for right selection of conditions which helps in reducing the time spent on overall development of methods and reduce the number of experiments required for the project.

Empowering R&D initiatives
ACD/Labs dole out Percepta, a platform wherein users can interface with a set of predictive tools that is designed for evaluating chemical compounds (via their structure). The platform enables users to evaluate the chemical compounds to estimate their physio-chemical parameter, human ADME properties and human toxicological liabilities.“With the advent of Pharma companies indulging in mergers and acquisitions, it is of utmost importance that the quality of the products that these mergers come up with is impeccable. In such a scenario, the impetus on R&D to reduce the time spent on these projects without compromising the efficiency of the people is quite high,” says K K Bhagchandani, Director and leader for Asian Business unit at ACD/Labs. The company fathoms this need as they proffer solutions that are designed for performing advanced levels of analysis for a comprehensive interpretation of the available data. Moreover the company offers predictive tools that are efficacious in calculating the existence of a particular chemical in a given sample and solutions that simulate chromatography to estimate the type of conditions that can give a better HPLC method. The solution can reduce 20% efforts and money spent in the process.

Summary
In the offing, ACD/Labs intend to continue focus on developing its solutions for Quality by Design (QbD) thereby unifying labs with its knowledge pool and creating avant-garde tools for characterizing impurities. They also have their heart set on being the leading solution provider of a comprehensive platform for creation and management of Pharma proficiency in the R&D space of the Pharmaceutical Domain. ACD/Labs empowers the R&D initiatives in various departments including Analytical Chemistry, Method Development, Structure Characterization, Toxicology, and Forensic Science to name a few. Identifying Asia to showcase a boom in the Pharma ambit, the company has charted out a blueprint wherein they have set up their client base and its seasoned team of experts in the continent to furnish their solutions.

“On behalf of ACD/Labs, I would like to extend our sincere thanks to the Asian research fraternity, as we now have 500 client organizations in Asia & Pacific geography utilizing our technology in their R&Ds” states K K Bhagchandani.