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.

Welcome to the Virscidian Blog. It’s likely that you have not heard of Virscidian before but we believe that will change. Virscidian is a provider of analytical chemistry work-flow solutions to laboratories of all sizes and we already have a track-record of enabling laboratories world-wide to process more efficiently with greater accuracy while integrating with existing IT environments.  What does this mean and what do we stand for?

We built software focused on supporting analytical chemists.  Good software.  Software optimized around processes, throughput and designed with the user in mind based on user requirements and guidance.  This knowledge came from more than 10 years owning, managing and supporting analytical labs.  There are many analytical software packages on the market that have a lot of functionality.  These can be either hardware vendor or third party solutions and they offer a solution to many problems. Unfortunately many of these are complex to use and are not optimal for many of the environments and users they are delivered into.  This is not a surprise as they are trying to service thousands of laboratories with a single package.  We believe there is another way.  We have created a vendor neutral, modular (we call them plug-ins) solution that can be “wired” together to provide a complete targeted solution to address many of the needs of analytical laboratories in the Life Sciences industry specifically.  We already offer off-the-shelf solutions for LC-MS data processing, visualization and reporting but continue to deliver custom solutions for laboratories with specific needs for processing, reporting, integration to databases and much more.  With a platform built on tried and tested Microsoft platforms, and with a commitment to the .NET architecture, our software is efficient, scalable and affordable.  That’s our business – we deliver the complete solution to meet your needs.

We will introduce you to our science, our technologies and our “secret sauce” over the next few months. Welcome to Virscidian…come back and hear about what we’re up to…checkout these two posters as teasers.

Elimination of the LC/MS Data Analysis Workflow Bottlenecks Using Analytical Studio

Enabling High-Throughput MRM Based Biomarker Validation Studies Through a Vendor Neutral Application