In many drug discovery organisations, analysing and evaluating data is a matter of juggling numerous Excel sheets and manually keeping track of the phases of the screening cascade, comparing compounds, and deciding what compounds to move forward.
It’s a widely used practice but the drawback is the difficulties of running an efficient process where new compounds are easily added to the project analysis and several collaborators can follow the progress of the experiments and the project and communicate directly on both compound, assay, and result levels.
This is one of the challenges we are solving with the grit42 project manager tool.
The project tool is designed to make life a bit easier for the project manager who needs a better way of managing all the data that is needed to run a project. Sometimes you'll have several different CRO’s delivering compounds and maybe also external collaborators running assays.
With the grit data management platform and the project manager tool on top, that entire process gets a lot more streamlined. Now you have the ability to easily assign new compounds to a project when you register them, and by using the different opportunities for naming or identifying the compounds as “front runner”, “lead” etc, it’s easy to sort and filter to get a view of the exact compounds and data you want to see.
The tool is essentially built around a SAR table functionality giving you insight into the structural properties and the pharmacological profile of the compounds. In the project manager tool, you can then also setup the relevant screening cascade.
You won’t have to start from scratch when you’re creating a new project. Sometimes it will be more effective to clone a previous project since the assays in the later phases are often the same and you can then just change the earlier assays as needed to support your next project.
If you’re building a completely new project you can build out your screening cascade before you upload your compounds to have everything in place to start analysing the registered compounds as data appears from the experiments.
When analysing your results, the project manager tool allows you to easily sort and filter your compounds based on their properties and results. This makes it easy to isolate certain ranges of compounds to investigate them more thoroughly or, for example, move them to the next phase of the screening cascade.
One of the benefits of the project manager tool is the flexibility in naming and annotating on both compound, assay, and result levels. You can change the status of your compounds to for example “lead candidate” as they progress through the screening cascade, and you can add annotations to keep track of everything and to communicate with co-workers.
For example, you can comment if a result looks unreliable, or you can make a “request annotation” to rerun a specific compound, etc.
The annotation tool allows you to see all historical comments on a project, making it a lot easier to go back and reiterate if the selected compounds prove inefficient later in the screening cascade.
The ability to get a quick overview of your compounds, assay, and results combined with the opportunity to drill down to gain deeper insights is exactly what allows for faster drug discovery processes and better decision-making.