ChemNews.Com VOL 6 NO 3

She is part of a new breed of scientific IT managers. Balancing both corporate mandates and end-user requests, Candace Apple has a track record of planning and deploying creative systems across Idun Pharm-aceuticals. From her office in La Jolla's biotech corridor, Ms. Apple bridges the information gap between the small (and growing) research facility and its mega-corporation collaborators. Keeping end-users, Idun senior management, and its corporate collaborators happy is no easy task. Add to that working with the mammoth IT departments of companies like Novartis, and you begin to understand why Candace Apple is CS Catalyst's IT Manager of the Year.

We caught up with Candace in San Diego. When asked what helped Idun succeed in the information area, Ms. Apple gives a lot of credit to the flexible environment of the growing company. "Like all companies, Idun has unique information needs. Idun's management recognized that a one-size-fits-all approach to information access means compromise, and compromise means lost productivity-something Idun cannot afford at the bench." Candace's explains that her job is to help the scientists focus on science, not on maneuvering IT systems. And due to Idun's close-to-the-metal environment, there is no "help staff" to buffer the IT engines from the chemists. Scientists at Idun interact directly with the IT systems. They need to ask their questions, get the information, and get back to work.

On the Desktop

How Idun achieves this goal is no small task, and is an ongoing effort. "We first decided to put something familiar on the desktop, not some custom front-end application that we'd need to support and maintain." Idun went with Netscape (or Internet Explorer) on the desktop, and with the ChemDraw plug-in from CambridgeSoft. "The scientists already know ChemDraw, and everyone is interacting with web browsers. We went for a zero learning curve for the scientists, and minimal client maintenance for the IT department. This combination is really the only option."

On the Server

On the server things get a bit more complex, but a cleverly layered architecture based on industry-standard tools greatly simplifies development. "Developing a chemical-registration system is really an ongoing effort. Projects change, businesses change, the questions we ask change. So one of our objectives was to produce a flexible environment, but frequently our IT vendors are reluctant to work on specialized products that cater to niche, vertical markets. We developed the server with the thought in mind that it should be maintainable by any good IT professional. Chemistry is a challenge, so we made our server environment as close to 100% Oracle and Microsoft as possible." To that end, Idun's server is a high-end Windows NT machine running Oracle and Microsoft Internet Information Server. Virtually all of Idun's custom development is done with Active Server Pages (ASP) and Java.

Chemistry on the Server

But what about the chemistry? "At Idun, we have compared price, flexibility, usability, and development trends of companies such as MDL, MSI, Tripos, and CambridgeSoft. Although, admittedly MSI and Tripos have their scientific niches, CambridgeSoft software has become our in-house solution to substructure searchability, linking structures to relational data, and compound registration. The reasons are that the ChemOffice packages have the most user-friendly interfaces, have a web link to relational databases, and are very cost effective.

We are deploying the CambridgeSoft WebServer to serve our reference databases, such as ChemACX. When we noticed how the WebServer made use of ChemFinder's SDK to serve chemistry, we thought to use this approach to add chemistry to our Oracle registration system. We added about a dozen ChemFinder functions to our ASP scripts, and we were able to provide the chemical end of our registration system." The actual chemical data is duplicated in the Oracle data table for safe keeping, while ChemFinder is employed to do searching, register new compounds, and present structures.

Success

Idun's result: An Internet-based chemical registration system, with Netscape and IE clients, and an Oracle/Windows NT Server. Idun's business logic is entirely in ASP, allowing virtually any IT consultant to work with the system. In addition to providing the chemical end of things, using ChemFinder allows Idun to exchange data with their large collaborators (via ChemFinder's SDFile and RDFile capabilities). "When we get large chemistry data files from places like Novartis, we can now deploy them in a matter of hours."

Indeed, even some of Idun's collaborators go to Ms. Apple when their own IT departments can't get them the answers they need. "We frequently interact with larger corporations and have received many compliments about the flexibility of our systems."

The Future

What's next for Idun? "A lot of our chemists like to pull the data from the server into Excel. Now that our Oracle system understands chemistry, our scientists can use ChemFinder for Excel to add chemistry to their spreadsheets. This is the next step on the desktop. On the server end, we're about to do a major scale-up in database size. We're confident that our Oracle/ChemFinder back end will scale."

CS Catalyst thanks Ms. Apple for her time, and congratulates her on being IT Manager of the Year.