Mark Murcko's career is based on the idea that you can indeed—platitudes aside—rush genius. In fact, his company's whole strategy is based on it.
So was his decision to take paper notebooks off the lab benches of his scientists.
As chief technology officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass., Murcko's challenge is to accelerate the company's ability to produce a profit-making drug. The company has two lucrative HIV products on the market but is still bleeding cash after 15 years in the business. In 2003, it lost $196.8 million on revenue of just $69.1 million.
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Murcko can't do a lot to accelerate the many rounds of clinical tests a new drug has to go through to be approved. But he can shorten the time it takes to come up with the drug in the first place.Those records, until 2002, were kept in paper notebooks that the company's 100 chemists filled out by hand. They would note the types of molecules they were trying to synthesize, the effect they were trying to create and whatever progress they'd made.
Then they went electronic—sort of. They would open an online product catalog to order the supplies they'd need to create the molecules, launch another piece of software to define the weight of the supplies, use another application to input the orders to machines that use robotics to automate the mixing of new compounds, and use yet another to create a visual image of what the molecule should look like. When all that was done, the chemist would compare, by hand and eye, the synthetic molecule with an image of the desired result.
If the molecule turned out to have the right properties, such as the ability to be absorbed easily by humans, the chemist would register it with the corporate database and store all of the data in a "supplementary materials file folder"—an accordion file filled with printouts from a series of highly advanced informatics systems.
"So they were stuffing these accordion files until they filled one up; then they'd go get another one," says Steve Schmidt, the company's vice president of information systems.
The process took a lot of time.
Electronic versions of lab notebooks were available from suppliers such as EKM Corp. and CambridgeSoft, but most tried to re-create the same functions and drawbacks as paper notebooks, according to Schmidt. Others were too generic in their functions to do much good.
"We found that [electronic lab notebooks] need to be specific to the function you're supporting," Schmidt explains. "Chemists, biologists and [molecular] formulators use different databases and lab equipment. One size does not fit all.''
