ACD/Labs Celebrates 500th Customer in Asia & Pacific Region
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ACD/Labs, a leading cheminformatics company, is pleased to announce the attainment of 500 customers in the APAC region (not including Japan). After their initial expansion into the Asian market in 2003, ACD/Labs maintained a direct presence with a growing customer base as more and more companies chose their software solutions to support R&D efforts. ACD/Labs counts customers working in areas such as chemical impurity identification, drug discovery, traditional Chinese medicine, natural products research, and chemicals research among its loyal clientele.
“Local investments in R&D were low when we first started the Asian office; with a lot of potential for growth,” says K.K. Bhagchandani (Senior Director—Asia & Pacific Business, ACD/Labs), the key architect of this regional success. “Today Asia is the top destination for R&D and we already have a sizable presence and strong solution portfolio to support research and innovation. On behalf of ACD/Labs, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to everyone at our customer organizations, who have invested with us by trusting our technology,” he adds.
For Asian chemical and pharmaceutical industries, maintaining the quality of their products in accordance with global standards is of prime importance. As they make this leap to the global market, dealing with new process impurities is a common occurrence. When asked about the value of ACD/Labs solutions Dr. Sameer Navalgund (Vice President Chemical Medicines, United States Pharmacopeia, India) stated, “[ACD/Labs provides] a great solution for impurity characterization and they’re good people to work with.”
In ACD/Labs’ endeavor to enable analytical method development while following principles of QbD, their software solutions are helping research in separation science to create robust stability indicating methods during pharmaceutical development processes. “We have used ACD Labs’ tools for chromatography method development while I was at AstraZeneca R&D where it saved us a considerable amount of time & effort in separating impurities,” said Dr. Sudhir Nambiar (former Managing Director & VP Pharma Development, AstraZeneca Pharma India Limited, 2010-2014).
Customers involved in drug discovery appreciate the value provided by ACD/Labs solutions based on predictive science, while customers involved in Natural Products research confirm routinely using the software for structure elucidation. Some opinions provided by customers in these areas of research are shared here:
“These are indispensable tools for medicinal chemists,” says Dr. Jitendra Sattigeri (Director & Head of Medicinal Chemistry, Daiichi Sankyo India).
“For me, ACD/Labs is synonymous with a comprehensive array of scientific tools, including reliable predictions, which help scientists working in small molecule chemical space achieve their goals,” says Dr. Sreedhara Voleti (Managing Director, Indras Pvt Ltd).
“These products make the discovery chemists life easier; as [a] lead optimization tool for medicinal chemists it allows laser optic focus on compounds that are more likely to become successful candidates,” echoes Dr. Kamlesh Padiya (formerly at Nycomed, India).
“It provides tools that allow medicinal chemists to analyze experiments in a highly scientific way that was not possible earlier," describes Prof. Rahul Jain (Professor, National Institute of Pharmacy Education & Research).
“It’s a routine here to use ACD/Labs tools, to prioritize our compounds from [the] library and their NMR tools help us characterize our Natural compounds,” explains Prof. Habibah Wahab (Universiti Sains, Malaysia).
Many ACD/Labs customers provide contract research services to multinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies, where speed and efficiency is the key to the successful delivery of projects. The VP of a Chinese CRO that deployed the software to thousands of chemists states, “We have always been committed to providing the highest quality service to our clients, and this has meant a commitment to acquiring market-leading technology to gain a competitive edge. As a result of an extensive software training and rollout program, every chemist can now use ACD/Labs software to become faster and more efficient in their work. Our scientists have been very satisfied with the products and services provided by ACD/Labs."
Knowledge sharing has also been a requirement for ACD/Labs’ customers, notably in China, Singapore, and India. “Given the rise in centers of innovation and scientific development, and growth of multinational corporations into the region, collaborative knowledge transfer enabled by the ACD/Spectrus platform came to the forefront,” says Dr. Guy Desmarquets (Vice President, Sales and Strategic Partnerships, ACD/Labs).
“The rapid growth of our customer base in the region shows the value the industry affiliates with our solutions. It also speaks to the quality of face-to-face service our capable team is offering our users. We are listening to regional needs through our customers and are willing to work with them to meet them and to keep our customers completely satisfied,” says Daria Thorp (President, ACD/Labs).