Specs - Cheminformatics, Compound Handling and Contract Research

Specs is one of the world's leading companies for the supply of diverse and focused screening libraries for drug discovery programs of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Also, Specs provides services in the fields of cheminformatics, compound handling and contract research.

Specs has more than 15 years of experience in research sample processing to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry in North America and Europe. Many projects have successfully been completed in Europe and North America.

COMPOUND ORGANIZATION

All life-science companies in the world have built collections of chemical compounds (compound files or compound decks) over the years. Specs has been commissioned to streamline these chemical compound collections of pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies. Specs' task in this is to analyse and process the historical collection so that it can readily be used in their storage and retrieval systems.

Specs processes batches of compound both on-site and off-site. On-site means that the compounds are processed at the customer's site, whereas off-site means that the compounds are being processed at either facilities in The Netherlands or the USA. Through these unique collaborations, researchers will gain access to potentially valuable compounds for high throughput screening using a uniform system spanning all compounds.

Specs' compound handling services include:

• Compound registration
• Quality control (LC/MS and/or 1H-NMR)
• Labelling
• Weighing
• Plating
• Reformatting
• Shipping
• Storage (off-site)

PROJECT OUTSOURCING

The advantages of these on-site and off-site operations are significant. With the speed of processing the collection by Specs, the compounds are available for screening much faster and a lot of valuable time is saved in the drug discovery process.

With these 'turnkey' projects the customer is released from the overall organization and investing in personnel, hardware and software. All requested activities in the project will be carefully implemented in customisable software that controls every step of the process by barcode reading.

The end product of a project is an organized collection with uniformity in vial type, labels, barcodes and details concerning tare weights and contents of the vials.

COMPOUND HANDLING PROJECTS

Typical examples of successfully completed projects:

In one project, Specs processed on-site over 230,000 compounds for an agrochemical company within eight months, with two shifts of ten people. All hard and software was provided by Specs including weighing stations, pipetting robot, computers and a local network. In total, more than 1,000,000 weighing actions were performed and 20,000 96-well plates were filled.

In a second project for a pharmaceutical company, no lab space was available and Specs transformed an empty room into a professional weighing lab with all necessary equipment like fume hoods, air-suction units, weighing stations and laptops. The contents of 180,000 original containers were transferred into new bar-coded repository vials within ten weeks time.

A third company has outsourced the processing of new compounds (either prepared internally or acquired from third parties) to Specs. Each time a batch of compounds is ready for processing, these compounds are shipped to Specs where they will be processed into the standard format of this customer.

References are available upon request.