Software companies

Molecular modelling used to be restricted to a small number of scientists who had access to the necessary computer hardware and software. Its practitioners wrote their own programs, managed their own computer systems and mended them when they broke down. Today s computer workstations are much more powerful than the mainframe computers of even a few years ago and can be purchased relatively cheaply. It is no longer necessary for the modeller to write computer programs as software can be obtained from commercial software companies and academic laboratories. Molecular modelling can now be performed in any laboratory or classroom. 

Whether life sciences informatics software ultimately becomes a commodity, with the commercial rewards for software companies being in packaging, integration, support, and deployment (in a similar way to the Linux community), and what impact the open source movement will have. In bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, open source, free software, and shareware are increasing in quantity, and it is becoming common for smaller software companies at least to release reduced-functionality versions of their software into the public domain at no cost. 

However, at least one software company has adopted the Litchfield-Wilcoxon method for its acute toxicity protocol package. 

CHEMKIN is now maintained and distributed by Reaction Design, Inc., which is a software company licensed by Sandia National Laboratories. CHEMKIN 4.1 is the latest commercial version of the CHEMKIN software suite from Reaction Design. The software suite has all the application modules of CHEMKIN II and III (such as SURFACE CHEMKIN, EQUIL, SENKIN, PSR, and PREMIX), and has been extended to include many more. Refer to the website http //www.reactiondesign.com/lobby/open/index.html for more information. 

A second investment, Vientity (http //www.vientity.com/), is a procurement software company that reached Incubators Work via word of mouth. A senior manager from ST Technologies had a friend who... 

It is not surprising that the giant boom in telecommunications at the end of the last century did contribute to the development and commercialisation of lO-software tools, massively. Various software companies have been founded which did enter an emerging market, and at R D facilities and institutes lots of proprietary, (and casually freeware) tools have been established. 

Whatever package is used, it is recommended that computergenerated costs be spot-checked for reasonable results using a hand-Held calculator since errors do occur. Some commercial software companies will develop cost estimation databases in cooperation with a company for site-specific costs. 

Clearly, much of the progress of collaborative R D significantly depends on the availability of advanced and flexible database structures for data handling, sharing, and management. The design and implementation of such databases continue to be major tasks for chemoinformatics. This has also been realized by a number of software companies that provide commercial compound database and management systems and offer customization services. 

I. InfoChem (http //www.infochem.de/en/company/index.shtml InfoChem GmbH is a software company for chemo-informatics founded in 1989 and based in Munich (Germany). InfoChem develops and distributes structure and reaction databases as well as software tools required for these applications. 

One special subset of this group, contained in an advertisement by the software company JEOL Limited of Tokyo, Japan entitled What is CgH6 Benzene appeared in several chemistry journals about 15 years ago. This ad was analyzed and then made into the subject of a report showing the limitations of any such computer program [26]. The first six of the 217 structures listed in this ad, which were repeated at the bottom of the ad and which have as the principal... 

These remarks raise several questions. Shall we continue to push the computer aggressively into the instruction of chemical engineering courses Who will create the educational software—faculty, software companies, or a collaboration of professional consultants with faculty If we make this aggressive push, how will we deal with the constant evolution of hardware and software systems These are the challenges to using the computer in education. I am interested in finding out what others have experienced. 

Free samples are a different case entirely, the ultimate combination of medical value and brand-name promotion. Most doctors happily give them to patients, even if they re not the drug of choice, figuring this will help low-income and elderly people save money. It s easier to know that the patient has his first several weeks supply then and there, explains Dr. Russell Robbins, a Wilton, Connecticut, urologist and chief medical officer of an insurance software company. But the samples aren t totally without controversy Some critics warn that too often they end up being used by the doctors and their friends rather than patients. And of course, once the free supply runs out, what brand name is the patient going to ask for ... 

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