Month: February 2024

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Exploring the Versatility of Lipid Nanoparticles in Drug Discovery

February 21, 2024

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have emerged as a compelling drug delivery system, offering significant advantages. Today, we'll delve into what makes LNPs so intriguing and explore why they are gaining traction in the pharmaceutical industry.

Advantages of Lipid Nanoparticles:

  1. Targeted Delivery: Surface motifs allow for targeting specific cells and with this targeting capability you can reduce off-targeting effects so there'll be less side effects to your drug and less drug would be needed.
  2. Great Half-Life: Oftentimes the nanoparticles will have a polyethylene glycol (PEG) serface modification which will allow for immune cell evasion.
  3. Payload Versatility: LNPs are able to carry multiple types of payload, including mRNA which often undergoes degradation in the body. Nanoparticles can protect this cargo from degradation, allowing for a therapeutic that would usually be challenging to use.
  4. Enhanced Cell Uptake: They have improved cell uptake, and with that you can control when the drug is released so you can allow the nanoparticle to be uptaken by the cell and then release the cargo once it's in the cell

Moreover, the endorsement of LNPs by the FDA is exemplified by the successful deployment of COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer.

LNP Experimental Workflow Captured in ELN:

  • LNP Components: LNPs are composed of a lipid mix. Most commonly is nucleic acid payload. The lipid mix can include an ionizable lipid, phospholipid, helper lipid, and stabilizer lipid. Several include cholesterol, or a modified cholesterol, but doesn't necessarily have to include all those.
  • Preparation Methods: LNPs are very modular and so they can be mixed, matched, and modified. You can have the same components but adjust how the formulation is made and it’ll result in a very different nanoparticle that may have different characteristics that you're looking for. You could adjust the size, the surface potential, any motifs on the surface of the nanoparticle, all to try to meet your need and provide a good drug delivery system.

Scilligence ELN Approach:

At Scilligence, our Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) offers comprehensive support for LNP design and development:

  1. Capability to design empty and loaded lipid nanoparticles
  2. Our system offers two distinct calculation approaches and they vary based off of the values that the user would have to enter
  3. Ability to handle multiple ionizable lipids and APIs in the nanoparticle design
  4. Retrieve component information directly from your Scilligence RegMol. Just like with the ADC you can register your components so all of your lipids and your RNA using HELM and being able to pull that into ELN to design your lipid nanoparticle
  5. Ability to register your lipid nanoparticle directly from ELN - Available in Version 7.3
  6. Track assays and stability with our suite of apps (ELN, RegMol, and Inventory) - Available in version 7.3

Here is a short ELN demo showcasing the LNP mole% form:

If you have any inquiries regarding how we can enhance support for your scientific workflows or any of our modules, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].

Spring Informatics Workshop (In-Person Event)

April 15, 2024
Catalyst Restaurant

We invite you to join us for an exclusive event at the Catalyst restaurant in Cambridge, MA, for our Spring Informatics Workshop on April 15th, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.

At this workshop, we will delve deep into the latest updates on the Scilligence informatics platform, designed to support all drug modalities, including drug conjugates and LNP.

Whether you're a seasoned researcher, scientist, or industry professional, this event is tailored to provide valuable insights and practical knowledge to enhance your workflows.

Here are some highlights you can expect:

  • Updates on the latest features and enhancements in RegMol, our unified entity registration system.
  • Exploration of advanced registration capabilities for various modalities.
  • Partner presentations by industry leaders from Certara and Zifo. 

(Stay tuned for the full agenda!)

Connect with peers, learn from industry experts, and discover how the Scilligence informatics platform can streamline and optimize your research processes.

Space is limited, so secure your spot today by clicking this link or the button below. 

Scilligence Insights: Evolving our Software

February 8th, 2024

At Scilligence, we have spent the last year exploring various avenues to enhance our scientific software. Using a three-pronged approach, we are committed to providing the tools necessary to optimize R&D workflows:

Partnerships for Expansion and Integration:

  • Currently partnered with CAS, Certara 360, Chemical.ai, Tetrascience, and Zifo.
  • Partnerships facilitate product expansion and integration by aligning business needs and workflows.

Features Development and Modality Enhancement:

  • Constantly developing new features and improving existing ones based on user feedback.
  • Unique capability to handle diverse modalities: small molecules, biologics, antibody drug conjugates, PROTACs, lipid nanoparticles, etc.
  • Focus on improving capabilities and workflows for each modality.

Customer-Centric Focus and Researcher Workflow Improvements:

  • Our strengths lie in a customer-centric approach, adapting and customizing to unique workflows.
  • Emphasis on quality of life improvements to make daily software use a pleasurable and productive experience.
  • Improvements to our roadmap process.

Key Features and Future Plans:

Version 7 Upgrade (October 2022):

  • New look and enhanced UI/UX.
  • Focused on functionalities for core products: Scilligence ELN, RegMol, and Inventory.

Version 7.2 (January 2024):

  • Further UIUX enhancements : improvements to existing modalities, templates and privileges to enhance end-user experience.
  • Streamlining of dataflow between Registration and Inventory Modules

Version 7.3 (Mid-2024) and beyond:

  • Introduction of a complete lipid nanoparticle (LNP) workflow across Scilligence ELN, RegMol, and Inventory including LNP design in ELN and RegMol, registration, capturing assay data, capturing containers, and tracking stability
  • Introduction of a formulations workflow across apps 
  • Conjugation form improvements in ELN. Includes conjugate builder function to build conjugates with registered entities, relationship registration, , and simplified customization process
  • Improvements in data capture flexibility using Microsoft Office in-place editing and reusable Flex forms.
  • Introduction of new biologically focused capabilities to ELN, including sequence display and manipulation, blast search, and sequence alignment.
  • Removal of XML layer for improved performance

As we embark on this journey of continuous improvement, Scilligence remains dedicated to providing solutions that streamline R&D processes, and drive innovation. 

Stay tuned for more updates!

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Intuitive Data Analysis

FOCUS allows users to analyze complex sets of chemistry and biology data interactively, identify lead molecules, visualize gaps in Structure-Activity Relationships (SAR), and accelerate drug discovery.

Data import and Charting

Within FOCUS, users can effortlessly import data from files, expanding the range of data sources you can utilize. Visualize chemical and biological data with chemically-aware charting and graphing tools, gaining a deeper understanding of your research.

Collaboration and Security

Collaborate securely in real-time, share findings, and maintain data integrity with robust security and compliance features. FOCUS ensures data privacy and regulatory compliance, while its adaptable framework allows for quick identification of lead molecules, gaps in SAR, and pathways for accelerating drug discovery and research.

 Seamless Data Integration

FOCUS is fully integrated with the rest of the Scilligence suite, allowing users to centralize chemical structures, biological assays, and experimental results from various sources, enabling easy access and unified analysis. FOCUS effortlessly brings together diverse data types, simplifying data management and facilitating cross-functional collaboration among research teams.

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Focus

Elevate your research with the Scilligence FOCUS module, which provides an intuitive and interactive solution for streamlined chemical and biological data analysis. The FOCUS module utilizes an adaptable framework that helps for quick identification of lead molecules. This allows FOCUS to help accelerate drug discovery by helping research teams to collaborate efficiently and make informed decisions.

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Project life cycle management

PMF is the central planning and control function for project management, defining how a project should be planned, implemented, monitored and closed.

Build and design custom workflows

PMF is an intelligent workflow design engine that provides you with a customizable solution for creating, managing and tracking your company’s business processes.

Make project plan online and track project progress

Project task templates streamline every aspect of planning and executing projects, while changes to the project plan can be controlled and approved by multiple users at any time.

Build enterprise internal knowledge base

Powerful indexing tool to search documents, emails, and notes.

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PMF

The Scilligence Project Management Framework (PMF) empowers organizations to manage workflow and project timeline effectively. It is an easy-to-deploy collaboration platform with crucial security control, cogent document sharing, and powerful data mining technology (structure and biosequence search). PMF will help manage your timeline efficiently and integrate workflow seamlessly (ELN, Registration, Inventory, ERP, Outlook).