Pharmaceutical information systems software

Earger chemical and pharmaceutical firms have, over the years, developed in-house systems with capabilities that are specific to the chemist s needs. Today, the costs of developing from scratch and maintaining an in-house system are prohibitive, especially because commercial chemical information systems are highly efficient and customizable. Personal chemical information software is still being developed and reported in the literature. Examples include a relational database patterned after the Upjohn Cousin system (108), and CheD, which is a SQL-based system with a Web client (109). 

Development of software for in-house chemical structure information systems has paralleled the development of public systems. One of the earliest commercially available systems for in-house use was the CROSSBOW system mentioned above. Initially the software was distributed by the developer, ICI Pharmaceuticals Division, but later Fraser Williams (Scientific Systems) Ltd assumed responsibility for marketing. This batch system was installed in some 25 locations and dominated the market until the late 1970s,... 

Mr. Salvage is currently the information systems business manager with CSR of Australia and is leading the company s ERP implementation with management and technical responsibility for software development and hardware infrastructure. Having spent 10 years with ICI and Zeneca, installing pharmaceutical process control and information systems, Mr. Salvage has in recent... 

While many computational chemistry teams in the pharmaceutical industry have developed proprietary software for analyzing the diversity of libraries, many of them have done so using tools supplied by commercial vendors of computational chemistry software (e.g, Barnard Chemical Information, Chemical Design, Daylight Chemical Information Systems, MDL Information Systems, Molecular Simulations, and Tripos). Some vendors emphasize the importance of 3D descriptors, although 2D descriptors seem to work surprisingly well for certain applications. In the future, key issues are likely to... 

TABLE 6.2 Pharmaceutical Companies and Their Systems Biology Portfolios of Commercial Software and Collaborations Based on Press Releases, Posters at Scientific Meetings and Information on Vendor Websites... 

To allow the pharmaceutical manufacturer to understand the extent to which the system as defined meets the requirements of the URS To ensure a structured approach to the presentation of information that can be referenced to the URS and carried forward into the software and hardware design specifications... 

A Design Review should be conducted before testing begins. This will normally involve developing a Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM). If no detailed design information is available then cross-references should be made between the newly prepared System Specification, available operator manuals, and user procedures. Source Code Reviews will be expected for custom (bespoke) software under the control of the pharmaceutical or healthcare company, and redundant code identified should be removed. 

For software development, documents such as URS and FS are the controlling specifications for the items to be delivered, and as such form part of the contractual document set for the software. These should be signed by all parties before any subsequent development work is undertaken, and changes in requirements should follow a standard contract variation process and should not be agreed informally between staff from both parties. Organizations should also consider whether it would be beneficial to include the type of documentation that would be required in an inspection situation as part of any escrow agreement that is established. In the event that the third party unexpectedly ceases to trade, the pharmaceutical or healthcare organization would then have access to the relevant documentation to back up its systems development. 

The manufacturing department ships the product in accordance with manufacturing guidelines, based on the receipt of valid purchase orders. The product documentation includes a Declaration of System Validation with statements from Hewlett-Packard that the software was developed and tested according to the Hewlett-Packard Analytical Software Life Cycle, a process that has been certified for ISO 9001 quality standard and for the information technology quality system (ITQS) compliance and that has been inspected by representatives from both computer validation companies and the pharmaceutical industry. 

Further information on expert systems and the use of artificial intelligence software in pharmaceutical formulation can be found in the literature (Rowe and Roberts 1998). 

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