This post is a long overdue return to the Mestrelab World of Sports. We started the company in the first place because we were very interested in NMR peaks, then we added an MS plugin to Mnova as we were very interested in MS peaks, and, to carry on the same vein, Carlos and I undertook some close-up studies of Pyrenean peaks last week. In fairness, I think these peaks where the first ones we became interested in, many years ago, before either of us knew NMR even existed.

The fact is, we have followed cycling all our life, and when it comes to cycling the biggest event is the Tour de France, a gruelling 3 weeks of excessive exertion with a fascinating 108 year history which can be traced to the Dreyfuss affair and which you can read here (it is a truly interesting tale of human enterprise and courage, even if you are not interested in cycling, I really recommend you read it).

This year, La Grande Boucle, another name for the Tour de France, celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first inclusion of the Pyrenees in its course, by spending longer than usual riding over the mountain chain which separates Spain from France. To us, lifelong cycling fans, this meant a combination of beautiful scenery, fantastic cuisine, great wines, hopefully good weather and many legendary climbs, so Carlos and I, with our childhood friend Nacho, headed for the Pyrenees with our bikes and our new Mestrelab Cycling Kit (One small confession, they headed out a couple of days earlier, I joined them a bit later)
For a week, with 2 bases at Arreau and then Luz St Sauveur (great place for an adventure or family holiday, BTW), we followed the Tour and took on some of the most famous, legendary, evocative and terrifying climbs in World cycling. Nacho and Carlos did Col d’Aspin, Aix 3 Domaines and Col de Peyresourde, I then joined them for Col d’Aubisque, Luz Ardiden and, leave the toughest for last, Col du Tourmalet. Last day, on the way home, I went over Tourmalet again on the way to the airport (nearly managed to miss my flight!!!) to compensate for the initial climbs I missed.

I could not recommend this area more. The scenery is beautiful (if you are ever there make sure you visit the Cirque de Gavarnie), you can have some great food (check out Hotel des Templiers in Luz St Sauveur and Viscos in Argelles Gazost, at the foot of Soulor/Aubisque, but in both cases book the previous day) and all kinds of outdoor activities can be undertaken (trekking, rafting, canoeing, abseiling, bungee jumping, rock climbing, etc.). If you are into cycling, then it is as good as it gets, with both the huge mountains or easy accessible rides on beautiful cycle paths!

So, after many hard climbs, and weather that ranged from good to bad to terrible, the main lesson was that starting and running a company is not really very hard and, whatever our customers and users expect from us, it has to be easier than climbing the Tourmalet on a bike in the driving rain!

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Shanghai was exciting as ever, and we spent most of the week in the Zhangjiang High Tech Area, in Pudong, which many Chinese call Pharma Valley. There we visited many companies, both divisions of Western companies as well as Chinese CROs, as well as holding a presentation/user meeting, which was very well attended, with over 30 representatives from companies in Zhangjiang. It was also pleasing to see that the uptake of our software by Chinese Universities continues to be very fast, with the number of users in China growing rapidly.

Of course, being Galician my stomach is very close to my heart, so I have to comment on culinary matters. Whilst running around the Zhangjiang area, we had several lunches and dinners which never cease to surprise me. If any of you guys are travelling there in business, you need to check out some of these restaurants. First of all, the food is nothing like the Chinese food I have had in the West. It is a lot more interesting and varied, and in Shanghai there is a lot of local cuisine specific to the area, with a particular mention due to a kind of dumpling called Xiao long bao (well, that is more or less how you pronounce it, if you are looking for it in Chinese menus it would look something like 虾肉小笼包 or 蟹黄小笼包, whether it is crab meat or beef – both are excellent. You can see a couple of photos below). All in all, we had several excellent meals, generously accompanied with TsingDao beer, for normally less than $30-$40 for 3 people, despite been in the commercial hub of the country and one of the main commercial cities in the World!

I also took the opportunity to visit the Expo. I must say that, although a lot of it is spectacular (special mention there to the Chinese Pavilion, which we could not enter, but which is pharaonic it is proportions and very becoming in its design, and to the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, with the World’s largest cinema screen, which visitors traverse on a conveyor belt in what is called screen immersion technology. I have to say this is very cool! Again, there are some photos in the photo gallery if you want to check them out) I don’t think the Expo is for me. A lot of queuing and waiting to see some introductions for a lot of different countries, it is an exhausting day. And, judging by the very weird Spanish Pavilion, you may come away with a very peculiar idea of what some of the countries are about. I guess, however, that if the only chance you have to visit these countries is through their pavilions at the Expo, then this may be an interesting and exciting cultural experience.

Whilst in China, I also decided that we definitely need a version of Mnova in Chinese, and this is now in the works. It will be released soon, I hope, as soon as we get our translations from the NMR people at TLWB, our very hard working Chinese distributors.

So, watch this space, I am hoping that we will very soon be announcing some more deals for our software in China as well as our Mnova Chinese version! And, of course, if you go to Shanghai, in particular to Zhangjiang, don’t go away without checking out the Xiao long bao (specially the crab meat one, delicious!)

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So, we made it into 2006, and the year started with Mestrelab’s first incursion into India, with a trip to Mumbai and Hyderabad, a stand at the Advances in Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology conference and visits to a few companies in the area, some of which are still our customers! At that same time, Ehud Olmert was replacing Ariel Sharon due to illness and Hamas were winning the Palestinian election.

Introducing... the one and only Stan Skyora

The year also started with our agreement of a development collaboration with Dr. Stanislav Sykora, which has now been successfully going for nearly 4 years and which has yielded many very pleasing results, such as, amongst others, our spin simulation system, our Bayesian DOSY toolbox and, just lately,  our GSD (Global Spectral Deconvolution) algorithm and module. We continue to work with Stan on several areas of great interest to the community and we are hoping to be in a position to make some announcements very soon.

This year also saw our first ENC, at a very rainy Asilomar. We had a 10×10 ft table at the Nautilus room, and again our stand was hugely busy, leaving Carlos and I very little time even for going running (of course, the lures of Suraj’s suite also have quite a lot to answer for that ).

Felipe, Isaac, Nik and Maruxa

From a software development point of view, this was a transition year. Carlos was still working hard on MestReC, but Nikolay, now in Santiago, Isaac and later also Maruxa and Felipe, who joined us during the year, were already working on our future software, Mnova, which condensed many of the ideas and feedback we had being elaborating in the previous years. Even though, ENC saw a couple of posters from Mestrelab, most notably with our new Whittaker Smoother baseline correction algorithm, published in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance (J.C. Cobas, Michael A. Bernstein, M. Martín-Pastor, Pablo García Tahoces, J. Magn. Reson, 2006, 183, 145-151).

After watching Italy win the Football World Cup and learning with misplaced relief of the permanent ceasefire announced by ETA in Spain, we also attended SMASH 2006 at Burlington, VT, were we had our first ever User Meeting attached to the SMASH conference (this has now become a Mestrelab tradition), and we sponsored and had a booth at the Spanish Bi-annual NMR Meeting, held in St Joan d’Alacant, on the Spanish Mediterranean Coast.

Apart from all this, we continued to work on the much anticipated release of Mnova, which was falling back into 2007, although towards the first Alpha version of Mnova was offered to around 100 users to start comprehensive testing of our quickly developing new software. However, we cannot mention this year without remembering one more event, in October, when we had the honour and personal pleasure of meeting Prof. Richard Ernst, Chemistry Nobel Prize, at an event organized in Santiago de Compostela.  You can see some photos of this event, which we were very proud to take part in, below.

Santi Dominguez giving our software to Richard Ernst

Carlos Cobas, Richard Ernst and Javier Sardina

And so 2006 finished, with Mestrelab boasting 7 people in the payroll and eagerly anticipating the release of Mnova which, being in 2007, falls in the next post. Still on this post, however, before the year was out we witnessed the sentencing and execution of Saddam Hussein in postwar Iraq, the first successful Nuclear Test by North Korea and the Somali and East Timor’s crises. And, of course, a new terrorist attack by ETA at Madrid Airport, which abruptly ended their ceasefire. The end of the year also saw the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion (these guys were definitely growing quicker than us, amazing to think Mestrelab was founded just before YouTube) and the release of the PS3 and the Wii, just in time for the Christmas consumer craze.

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

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Last Sunday we arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the AUREMN Conference. After a visit to the Christ of Corcovado, the very imposing 38 m figure of Christ sitting on top of a 700m high tropical jungle easily climbed in a 20 min funicular trip and affording the visitor incredible views of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, we made our way by coach to Angra dos Reis for the AUREMN Conference.

Santi (left) and Carlos (right) in Leblon, Río de Janeiro

The conference was fabulously organized by a very hard working group, headed by Daniel Figueroa and the omnipresent and ever incredibly helpful Sonia Cabral de Menezes. These guys managed to put together a conference with an excellent scientific programme, a fantastic location, Hotel do Frade, a kind of lodge in an island paradise, an excellent social program (you can see here photos of the beach, the boat trip on the last day and some of the parties going on) and the most helpful organizing team you would ever wish to meet. Everything was spot on, even on details such as making sure vendor areas had internet provision, something essential to us but often overlooked by conference organizers. This meant that we had a fantastic time and a wonderful experience of Brazil, whilst attending some high quality talks in an environment fully conducive to our business. A huge well done goes to the organizing team and a strong recommendation to anyone who has chance to attend this meeting in future to do so.

Our stand was very busy during poster sessions and the breaks. We met many of the people in the Brazilian and South American NMR community, and were immediately impressed by the variety of work these guys are doing, their openness to new ideas and their enthusiastic welcome of Mnova. The trip was hugely positive and we are very optimistic about the progress of our business in Brazil. We also made many friends, I wish I could mention them all here, but there are too many and therefore I prefer not to name any, as I would not know who to omit. You all know who you are, though, thank you for your friendliness and for helping us fall in love with Brazil and feel welcome by the AUREMN and the Iberoamerican NMR group. We look forward to many returns to your conferences and to working with many of you in the near future. In a new post, I will follow up with my thoughts about the scientific programme …

In the mean time, just a quick special mention to O Rio de Janeiro. We were very lucky to be able to spend time there with real cariocas, as I have family there. This gave us a great insight into the city in a very short period of time. Rio is the most beautiful natural environment for a city, with a stunningly beautiful bay, great beaches (Ipanema, Copacabana, Leblon, an spectacular jungle which encroaches into the city at every opportunity and the most uncunningly perfect vantage points at Corcovado and Pao de Açucar. The people are friendly, the food great and the night life excellent (check out the area of A Lapa and the incredibly beautiful restored XV century building housing the supercool samba house ‘Rio Scenarium’.

Overall, this has been a week we will never forget

Carlos Trips and business development Mestrelab Brazil, Mestrelab South America, Mestrelab Trips, Mnova in Brazil 6 comments Leave a comment

Wednesday and Thursday was spent in Beijing, where we arrived late on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, TLWB had organized another presentation open to all those interested. We had 90 people registered and, in the end, over 75 turned up. Once again Mnova NMR, NMRPredict Desktop and the alpha version of the Mnova MS plugin (more on this very soon in this blog) were all received with enthusiasm by the attendees, representing many of the Universities in the city and some of the biotechs and CROs. As a result of this presentation, a couple of meetings were organized for Thursday.

Wednesday night, we went for dinner to Zhi Li Hui Guan,  a fantastic restaurant in central Beijing, just by the western gate of Tsinghua University. This restaurant is trying to recreate the cooking style of North Eastern China in the XIX century, in the period of the Qing Dynasty. The restaurant is truly spectacular, with a beautiful building, some dishes out of this World (everything was excellent but, for presentation and excellence of preparation, I have to highlight the ‘beef in a box’ (unfortunately I do not know the name of this dish, I just looked at the photos in the menu!). This is brought to the table inside a wooden box, and it is a dish designed for and only enjoyed by, top government officials of the time. The box is beautifully decorated and must be opened in stages, affording to that who opens it longevity (this is represented by a very long  which must be removed before the box can be opened) good fortune, a first layer containing 6 dishes with different sauces, and prosperity, the bottom layer, which holds the most tender beef you can ever hope to taste. A truly amazing dish and a great restaurant. If you are in Beijing, don’t miss it.

Mike, Santi and Hongyu Liu in Beijing

Beijing people are extremely proud of their city, and with good reason, it is as spectacularly beautiful as it is congested. I benefited directly from the pride and generous hospitality of one of them, our driver Mike (this is his Western name), who was taking us back to the hotel to collect our stuff after presenting at the last CRO of the day. Mike was shocked when he heard I had not had time to visit the city or do any sightseeing, and he took it upon himself to take us to Tiannamen Square and around the Forbidden City, where we took some photos, and then running us to the spectacular Terminal 3 of the Beijing Airport, delivering us there 45 minutes before the departure of our flight to Qingdao. Thank you, Mike – he is, by the way, with me and Mr. Liu in the photo to the right.

I found some more interesting facts about China in Beijing. The first, I was amazed by how early children get up and attend school. I went running past a primary school at 6.00 and the kids were exercising in the playground, ready for a long day of education (6.00 until 18.00, I believe). This is of course one of the reasons why Chinese American returnees (many of them are coming back to work in the pharmas, biotechs and CROs of the large Chinese capitals) are finding it very hard to convince their children to come back with them. This is also one of the reasons why China is having no difficulty acting as a conveyor belt in the mass production of highly qualified scientists.

I found the standard of NMR knowledge to be very high at both presentations we gave, with most organic chemists there used to concepts such as apodization of 1D or processing and analysis of 2D correlation such as 2D NOE.

Another interesting fact is the high quality of the labs and facilities, i.e., the research and development infrastructure. Most of these have been created in the last few years, and this means that they all enjoy very modern facilities, normally purpose built by the government and then either sold or rented to these companies. These facilities are normally outside town, but most companies run coaches all over the city, collecting their employees to take them to work and delivering back to the cities at the end of the day.

This is all from a very quick visit to Beijing. Just a few comments on Qingdao, where we spent Friday training the TLWB stuff. I was amazed by Qingdao, which is the city where the sailing competitions were held in the Olympic Games. It has a population of 5 million, very beautiful beaches, excellent accommodation at very reasonable prices (how about a huge kingsize bedroom for €60 per night with breakfast and internet included in the Haiqing Hotel, the hotel used by many of the Olympic delegations during the Games? BTW, every single hotel in China appears to have free internet access, this is something that hoteliers in the West should really learn from). Qingdao is also famous for its breweries, probably as a consequence of having been a German colony in the XIX and early XX century, and has a beautiful German quarter, with alpine and Bavarian style villas in leafy streets surrounding some excellent beaches. I think this would be a fantastic place to spend a beach holiday, and a very economic alternative to the European resorts (Cote d’Azur, Costa Brava, Riviera, etc.) If you made it there, do not miss Yangguang Jiari a fantastic fish restaurant where you pick your food prior to cooking from tanks and ice buckets (see Qingdao photo gallery). 

Santi Trips and business development Mestrelab Beijing, mestrelab china, Mestrelab Presentations, Mestrelab Qingdao, Mestrelab Trips, mnova china No comments Leave a comment

So, here I am, sitting at my Beijing hotel, late in the evening, ready to fly out to Brazil tomorrow. This visit to China has been a whirlwind, and I have not had time to update the blog, as the opportunity to do so had to compete with, and finally lose to, the chance to get some much needed sleep. The trip has been great, and I have found out a lot of new stuff. I will try to update a couple of times in the next couple of days, with short articles on the time spent at each of the cities I visited.

From right to left, Chen, Hongyu Liu, of TLWB, and Santi ready for business in Shanghai. Click on the photo to view the Shanghai library

Shanghai continued to impress me as a truly bustling Asian metropolis, a city of business and commerce. There I met Mr. Hongyu Liu, the General Manager of TLWB (see previous post), who is a very hard working and organized individual with the hunger for success and commitment to achieving it that one can expect from entrepreneurs in recently prosperous economies. Hongyu also happens to be a thoroughly nice and likeable guy, a great host and a very democratic manager to his team of young and smart employees. I expect great things from these guys.

The week started very well, with a visit to the restored Shikumen district of Xin Tian Di (New Heaven), in the heart of Shanghai, the ‘in’ place for eating, drinking and partying in Shanghai, with a mixture of Western and Oriental style establishments, although perhaps with too much of a bias towards the Western. It is also the location of Paul’s, a very stylish French boulangerie and teahouse with excellent coffee and cakes. After a very nice evening there on the first day, we then worked through the Sunday and finished with dinner at Herbal Legend, in Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, very close to the excellent Parkyard Hotel (Bibo Lu). If you are visiting Shanghai in business, I strongly recommend both. As far as industrial area eateries go, ‘Herbal Legend’ is exceptional, with very good service, life Chinese music most nights and a huge menu of very high quality prepared by Chinese herbal medicine experts, so this is not only good eating, but also good for your health!. On the Monday we visited some companies in the Hi Tech Area, where our software was received with excitement and, on Tuesday, we held a presentation at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, organized by TLWB and attended by more than 40 scientists from different companies and educational and government institutions. The presentation was a great success and gave us very good traction in the Shanghai area, as well as providing an opportunity for me to try out my incipient Chinese. You will be able to see some photos of the presentation and of some of the attendees by clicking on the photo above or on this link.

After this, it was time to make for the airport ready to fly to Beijing, the next stage of the trip. More on that a little later. But first,a  couple other interesting facts about China and particularly the Chemistry and NMR community there and, like many things in China, it is all about numbers.

It turns out that there are more than 1,000 organizations (public and private) doing NMR within China which, for such a technology and capital intensive technique, is a very impressive number and shows how far these guys have come so quickly.

The second is about the Chinese government approach to CRO, pharma and biotech. We visited AQ Biopharma , a biopharmaceutical start up which is sharing a building with a further 60 start ups. All the facilities are owned by the central government, and rented out to these companies in very advantageous conditions. Each of them gets a lab (different sizes available) and an office. On the ground floor of this 6 storey building (and, by the way, there are several of these buildings in one road, at least 4-5 housing around 60 start ups each) there is a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer and some LC/GC/MS equipment, together with NMR and LC/GC/MS experts, available to all users in that building. I have seen similar set ups in the West (for example, the Nexus facility at Santiago de Compostela University) but the amazing thing here once again is the numbers involved. If there are about 300 of these start ups in one road in one city, what are the chances of some of these succeeding?

All this is fuelled by a ready supply of chemists and biochemists, which are being churned out by Chinese Universities at a rate of knots, as these are still very popular subjects for University hopefuls, unlike in the West, where the scarcity of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics graduates is posing a problem. And these scientists are very keen on improving their language skills, one of their self-acknowledged challenges. The Pudong Language School is a building of pharaonic proportions which was already open at 6.30 am, when I ran past it. This is not going to stop us from releasing Mnova in Chinese, though. Mnova is already available in Japanese, Russian and Spanish, as well as English, and it is prepared so that it is very easy to ‘localize’ to other languages. If any of you have any other suggestions on possible languages Mnova should support, please use the comments to let us know.

OK, next post, Beijing.

Santi Trips and business development, Uncategorized Mestrelab, mestrelab china, mnova china, shanghai 3 comments Leave a comment

There are very conflicting theories at the moment as to the role of Marco Polo and Admiral Zheng He in medieval times in the coming together of the Western European and Chinese cultures, and who discovered who. You could do worse than checking out 1434, by Gavin Menzies, to read some alternative history.

I am now following on the trail of Marco Polo, but of course I have no pretensions of discovering China, rather, we are trying hard in Mestrelab to get China to discover Mnova, so far with a relatively pleasing measure of success. Before I get into matters Mestrelab, though, there are a few really amazing things one finds out on arriving in Shanghai, which is an incredibly modern and buzzing city. I was here last November, and I was really taken by surprise by the speed of the developments in this area of China.

The first incredible thing is the district of Pudong, on the East shore of the Yang-Tze river. This was basically farmland 10 years ago, which is truly incredible when you see it now, as the people of Shanghai have built 12,000 (yes, 12,000!) skyscrapers since then in this new part of town. One of them, the Shanghai World Financial Center, I believe to be the 2nd tallest in the World at present, and many others are hugely imposing and spectacular buildings. The realization that all this has sprung from nowhere in 10 years really gives the newcomer a measure of the power of aspiration of the Chinese society in economic terms.

Santi in Shanghai, with the Pu-Dong skyline behind, last November (2008). Click on the photo to view more from the Shanghai album

The next thing that catches your eye is downtown Shanghai. Buzzing with commercial activity, spectacular with a beautiful (and incredibly contrasting from one shore to the other) skyline, and no end of places for the visitor to go to, great restaurants, exciting nightlife, modern facilities. A true metropolis of the XXI century. Check out a few photos, unfortunately spoilt by me and Chen, by clicking on the photo to the left.

The second incredible thing in Shanghai is the Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, and in particular what guys over here call Pharma Valley (I guess in a reference to the very notorious Silicon Valley in CA, US) Pharma Valley is a huge sprawl of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies which have sprung up in Pudong in the last 5 years. It takes close on half an hour to cross it in a taxi and, although I have heard different estimates, it would appear that there are between 100,000 and 250,000 chemists and biologists currently working in and around it. For anyone working in this industry, this is a mind boggling number. Of course, for me, marketing software desktop licenses, this is a sleep depriving piece of information! It is in any case fascinating and I am very lucky to have seen it and happy to have visited it. I think anyone working in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries should do so sometime. The visit is so exciting, that I was inspired to start learning Mandarin after last time (I am still working on that, although with very little time which makes progress frustratingly slow)

The good news for Mestrelab is that we already have some customers in Pharma Valley, people like Alputon Inc. and Hutchison MediPharma Limited, as well as a number of Chinese universities (University of Tsinghua, South China Botanic Garden, Institute of Materia Medica Beijing, National Chiao Tung University, Beijing Institute of Chemistry, Fudan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Defence Medical Center) who are the early adopters of our software. After this visit, I hope to have many more. This week I am going to Shanghai and Beijing, as well as Qingdao. Chen is staying over for nearly a month, and I am sure he will make further progress (for one thing, his Chinese is much better than mine!). We also now have a distribution company working with us, Qingdao Tenlong Weibo Technology Company Ltd. These guys are very professional and hard working, and they will be developing the business for us in China, as they already have a very strong presence in the Chinese chemical R&D market. Qingdao is famous for its beer and its beaches, but maybe there will soon another reason!

I am going to be here for a week, after which I cross the World to go to Brazil (more on that on oncoming posts). I hope to post some photos of the city later in the week and, hopefully, some news on business progress. I may even come up with a little ‘my guide to Shanghai’ assuming I get time to find some good places to visit, eat, drink (not necessarily in that order).

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Visit to eMolecules

From left to right, Craig James (eMolecules), Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and Santi Dominguez (Mestrelab) in Del Mar, by the eMolecules office. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

So, as part of our trip to California a few weeks ago, immediately prior to the ENC, we also visited eMolecules. I omitted this on that previous post to avoid overloading it, and also because I wanted to allow some more room to discuss what these guys are doing (in our opinion, extremely well).

Of course, the first great thing about visiting eMolecules is their location, in Del Mar, CA. This is a beautiful area just North of San Diego, with a spectacular beach. The eMolecules office as well as Klaus’ house enjoy stunning views. Combine this with the great restaurant and bar offer in Del Mar and we were obviously very happy there.
However, the most pleasing thing was meeting with the eMolecules team and hearing of the great progress eMolecules are making. Their star Cheminformatics product, eMolecules Plus, is now gaining excellent acceptance in the biotech and pharma industries, with several high profile adopters (not sure I am allowed to mention them here, so I will not, you could probably find them in the eMolecules web site somewhere, but some of them really are major players). If the Cheminformatics guys in your organization are not using eMolecules Plus, you should send them to the eMolecules Plus product page to take a look. They could find it very interesting.

The other great bit of news is that eMolecules is really succeeding at creating a great ecommerce solution for people buying screening blocks. They now allow you access to all major screening block suppliers in a ‘one-stop’ screening blocks e-commerce interface (I cannot link a demo here as it is not quite ready, we show a late alpha and it is very impressive. I will let you know as soon as it is available) which you can combine with many of the listing and searching features in eMolecules and eMolecules Plus to save outrageous amounts of time and effort in the procurement of screening blocks. I know one of their customers just managed to place an order for over 3,500 different compounds in one single process, and anyone who has tried to purchase a large variety of screening blocks in the past will know how useful this is. I believe they saved over a man-month!!! Now, what would you, or I, do with one extra month?. So, once again, I would point the people who buy screening blocks at your organization in the direction of the eMolecules ecommerce system – at this point, what they need to do is to contact Niko directly (niko@emolecules.com) as the general demo site is not quite up and running as explained above. Your purchasing guys will be forever in your debt, and you will be able to claim the favour some time later, I am sure!

From left to right Craig James (eMolecules), Carlos Cobas (Mestrelab) & Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and, behind them, the Pacific Ocean. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

Finally, and not really related, we also heard while we were there that Niko just got a paper accepted in Science! Now, that is something you don’t hear from people everyday, so congratulations to Niko, these guys make good software but also do good science!

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