Observation

Small or large, our organizations are having their marketing budgets squeezed and we are globally being asked to find new ways to market ourselves and our products. Traditional marketing is arguably becoming replaced by on-demand viral marketing though social media forums such as Blogs, You tube, Face Book, and community groups on professional sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo. So while these forums do have a role to play how should we best leverage their power and influence when the market we promote too may often be niche?

In search of the constructive input

So how should we best market ourselves and our products in a way that gets us to the people that may want our products that maybe never heard of who we are and all of this in niche industries?

That really is the crux of the question that I’d like to get feedback on. Comments are most welcomed…

We are in the final straight preparing for the Release of Analytical Studio Professional Version 1.1 – Compound QC workflow due to be released at the end of June.

Our foci for this release

• Getting you closer to a quality and reliable result requiring as little additional manual manipulation as possible.
• Providing you a richer, more streamlined results review experience for speed scanning through large volumes of results at a glance.

Quality and reliability of your results

Getting a software processing method optimized to produce the perfect result is one that many of us know can be a time consuming and tedious process, especially when you have to repeat this for every analytical detector stream that you are using/ {MS – Positive and Negative Ionization, CLND, ELSD, UV and so on…}. With this release we are delivering a fully interactive data processing tuning tool where you can visually see the impact of the processing settings and data filters in real time. You might call this the WYSIWYG of analytical data. Our experiences during testing have resulted in methods being developed from scratch to ideal processing method in less than half the original time using early implementations of our software. At the same time, we have also found it is much easier to get a processing method that produces more reliable and consistent results which in turn increases the trust in the result and reduces the time to quality control review the results.

Richness of information and streamlined data review

Results interpretation and evaluation can often be a tedious process, requiring lots of individual pieces of information, extracted spectra, chromatograms and feedback messages from processing, in order to perform results QC quickly and efficiently. Consider the impact of what one mouse button click can do for your results evaluation when you have 1000 or 10,000 samples to review. So, with this release we have redesigned our sample summary information page to bring together all important facets of sample results, processing warnings, and other important information in a single visual concise color coded summary page. At the same time diagnostic information has been made more readily available to ensure that the time to result is reduced as much as possible.

Our aims for your research

As a company focused on giving you 100% of what you want, our commitment is to continue to strive to improve what we offer as our different workflows, and make them deliver what you want from your data, at the highest possible level of accuracy, maximum level of precision, maximum level of relevant information, maximum flexibility of reporting and minimum amount of time for review.

About Virscidian Inc.

For those not familiar with Virscidian Inc., our products, services and solutions: we are an analytical chemistry software company founded as a spin out from an Analytical Clinical Research Organization (CRO), offering software products and implementations that support a number of different tailored workflows. Two examples of what we do include High Throughput LC/MS Compound QC Screening (HTS) and HTS Biomarker Validation and Quantitation. Our software is built on our proprietary development software framework, which in turn allows us to build completely customized workflows that encompass only functionality that is required to deliver the workflow. Results may be viewed using our Analytical Studio Reviewer (ASR) which has also been licensed by Agilent Corporation for sale. Our development, customization and business analysis services are available by request.

I feel very fortunate to have known Joseph Simpkins (CEO of Virscidian) for close to a decade now, meeting him first when he joined Eli Lilly to develop their compound QC informatics solution. Back then the focus, which is still a major part of early drug discovery, was to be able to determine which compounds had been chemically synthesized, which ones hadn’t and how pure the synthesized product was. Sounds simple? Certainly the technologies to acquire the data are easy and routine to use however as each company and group want something different in how they treat their data, what looks on paper to be easy, often turns into something more with extras needs and expectations from different stakeholders?

One of the things that always impressed me with the solutions that Joe created, including Analytical Studio Professional 1.1 that is available from Virscidian Inc., was that they were born from a fundamental need for a company or colleague to solve some time consuming and often repetitive process, both quickly and accurately. His solutions to these problems have been developed typically alongside the person or the activity and thus mimic closely the workflows and functionalities required. The solutions that he created were typically done quickly using a rapid prototyping approach whilst sitting with the chemist, scientist or end user and getting their direct feedback on what developments had been made. Joseph later in his career started Opans LLC, with his friend and colleague Kenneth Lewis back in 2002 and in the year’s in-between has worked tirelessly to produce a commercial software platform for processing LC/MS data for a number of different workflows. I’d like to explore aspects of this in a future blog.  At the end of 2008 Joe spun out from Opans to create Virscidian which now is a commercial company promoting and selling its software solutions and customization services  for the software.

So when Joseph approached me and asked if I’d be interested in joining Virscidian, it was really a very quick decision process that led me to the conclusion that this would be an exciting opportunity and a great match of skills and shared aspirations of both Joseph and myself.

One things that I have personally found very attractive in talking with Joseph has been the company willingness to be open to new possibilities, new directions and to deliver to our customers not just an off-the shelf product that does x, y or z, but a solution that can be adapted to meet the needs and workflows of chemists, scientists in drug discovery companies, synthetic and analytical chemists in other industries such as agrochemical, forensic, sports, food and so on. At this time Virscidan is able offer solutions in the areas of routine Compound QC, Quantitation and Biomarker Validation. This philosophy of delivering to the needs of scientists and analytical chemists forms part of the company motto of aiming to deliver “100% of what you want”.

Posted By Mark Bayliss

Who is Virscidian and where did we come from?  Joseph Simpkins, President of Virscidian, has 15 years of experience in managing engineering and informatics projects in the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industry and was a cofounder of OpAns, LLC.  OpAns is a Contract Research Organization providing services to the pharmaceutical industry and focused on the application of mass spectrometry to a number of issues including quantitative analysis, structure and biomarker validation and determination of physicochemical properties.  At Opans Joseph applied his expertise to the development of software tools to support the needs of the laboratory and was able to produce a platform that excited the customers of OpAns.  With time, the customers were interested not only in the services provided by OpAns but also by the software platform, at that time branded as “Analytical Studio”.

What About Analytical Studio?

The technology was developed over the course of 7 years and during that period several large pharmaceutical companies invested in the software for their laboratories.  In that time, the software architecture underwent three major iterations until it settled on a powerful but flexible plug-in based architecture branded as “The Analytical Studio Framework” (to be discussed in depth in a seperate blog post).  In 2008, the progress of Analytical Studio caught the attention of folks in R&D at Agilent Technologies.  So, by mid-2008, a small limited subset of the software built on the Analytical Studio Framework was licensed by Agilent Technologies (to be discussed in a separate blog post).  The Analytical Studio Framework allows rapid development of full featured work-flow solutions.  Starting with vendor independent raw data reading and viewing.   Then data processing and review with integrated editing of results followed by reporting and publishing and archival of results and raw data.   In essence, it is a high-throughput tool that automates the conversion of raw data to results while allowing the flexibility of vendor independency and is a powerful and flexible viewing tool for some of the major formats adopted in the industry.

With seven years of stress-testing in large pharma labs and a CRO environment,  Analytical Studio has been optimized for performance, throughput and quality of results.   But without loosing the flexibility to adjust the software to be optimized for the customer’s workflow.   Analytical Studio is componentized and can be configured to provide solutions for different environments …this is how we have built solutions for Agilent to have an Analytical Studio Reviewer, why we can rollout a fully enabled version called the Analytical Studio Professional and why we can have an “Express” version for background processing, reporting and have Analytical Studio Repository for the publishing of data.

We will shortly start publishing some movies and presentations about Analytical Studio in its various flavors from highly customized solutions for research projects (parallel HPLC and biological deconvolution) to off-the shelf compound characterization and biomarker validation.