Article: Akcros Land and Sea

How Akcros Chemicals co-ordinates its research activities using ChemOffice.

In the high-speed world of chemicals research, there are no prizes for coming second. The race to find the winning formula involves endless rounds of testing and even minor adjustments in formulation can lead to significantly improved performance. Akcros Chemicals turned to CambridgeSoft’s ChemOffice to co-ordinate the cooperation of their centres across Europe.

Akcros Chemicals in The Netherlands is a business unit of Akzo Nobel and has expertise in the area of polymer additives. The laboratory tests new formulations in conjunction with other Akcros centres.
Dr Harvey uses ChemOffice (supplied and supported by Adept Scientific) to sort, categorise, and keep track of the wide range of organic chemicals, which the company tests in its search for useful properties.
Using ChemFinder - the database feature within ChemOffice - the laboratory has set up an information management system for the compounds, with forms and sub forms covering different formulations for different compounds. All these formulations can be stored in a database along with drawings of structures, captions, and notes. The database catalogues which compounds have been tested and the results of those tests, together with the compounds as yet untested.

The database is a valuable tool for looking at different groups with different functionality. It is easy to carry out structure searches. Using ChemFinder to store the results allows the comparison of the performance of various compounds. A different subform is used for each of the numerous possible test system formulations and records subsequent performance. If standard products are used, the performance of new compounds can be compared - even if the original test was carried out in a geographically different location.

As the layout of the forms and subforms are generated completely from scratch, the inclusion of code names is easy to cross-reference with chemical names/supplier/ batch numbers etc. All of these items are then searchable.

Chemfinder lets you archive results in a format which does not deteriorate with time, takes up little or no storage space and is totally searchable electronically, either by structure/substructure or keywords/codes.
The reporting tool used to display the hit list is also very useful and can be used to view a virtual image of the test results as seen by the chemist the day they were prepared.

“I have also imported databases from outside sources to then try combinatorial chemistry on a small scale,” explains Dr Harvey. “The CombiChem/Excel addin allows for simple modelling of parameters e.g. Bpt, Mpt etc. These can then be used to choose which of a range of possible structural variants you use your resources to make.”

The Akcros laboratories in the Netherlands are working closely with laboratories in Germany and the United Kingdom. Using this database they can share the same information and avoid duplication of effort. It is planned to develop a shared server to make this joint resource more easily accessible.
“The software is very intuitive with self-explanatory icons,” says Dr Harvey. “When I started with the software, I did not need to go to the manual at all - I could do whatever I wanted after spending only a little time playing around with the program.”

Users can draw the chemical structure of a compound simply and directly on-screen using the pre-set chemical bond and structure symbols and then store the structure with the information.

So is there anything we could do to improve it? “I do have one point,” says Dr Harvey. “It would be great to make E-Notebook (another element of Chem-Office) available on a pocket PC. As a chemist, I find I am writing the same information on a note-book, on the PC and on a report. If we could extend the notetaking capabilities of ChemOffice to a hand-held organiser...?”