Symyx Enhances Software with OpenEye Technology

In an extension of its strategic partnership, Symyx Technologies, Inc. plans to integrate OpenEye’s Lexichem™ structure-name converter software with Symyx Draw and other key solutions including the soon-to-be-released Symyx Isentris® 3.1 informatics system.

According to Company, this integration will enhance and accelerate chemical compound searching by enabling chemists to generate structures for query or other purposes simply by providing chemical names rather than drawing the structures. This time-saving capability initially will be incorporated into the upcoming release of the Symyx Draw structure editor.

“OpenEye products are complementary with Symyx solutions and by working together we will provide our customers with best-of-breed functionality,” said Dr. Trevor Heritage, President of Symyx Software. “This partnership creates greater flexibility within discovery workflows through improved efficiency in converting chemical names to chemical structures and vice versa. We look forward to a long-standing relationship with our colleagues at OpenEye Scientific Software.”

“With Symyx, OpenEye’s outstanding cheminformatics will gain a larger audience,” said Dr. Matthew Stahl, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Development at OpenEye Scientific Software. “The breadth of Symyx software solutions and their diverse customer base presents us with an outstanding opportunity to further temper our software.  It has been a pleasure working with an industry leader like Symyx, and we anticipate strengthening our relationship in the future.”

As part of a continued program to extend the range of files supported by Symyx Draw software to include chemical structure formats, Symyx will incorporate file converters from OpenEye’s OEChem programming library for chemistry and cheminformatics into Symyx Draw. This integration will enable Symyx Draw to read and write ChemDraw (CDX), canonical SMILES™ and a number of other file formats.

As part of this agreement, Prous Science, part of the scientific business of Thomson Reuters, and Symyx are extending to OpenEye access to the MDDR database, the bioactivity database jointly produced by Symyx and the scientific business of Thomson Reuters, for use in validating OpenEye’s various scientific algorithms. OpenEye will also be able to validate their models against the well-known Symyx Comprehensive Medicinal Chemistry database (Elsevier).