ACD/Labs, an informatics company that develops and commercialises software in support of digitalised R&D, has announced a new release of Katalyst D2D, the software for workflow digitalisation and data management in chemical and process development.
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“This release of Katalyst D2D is the direct result of close collaboration with key opinion leaders in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Andrew Anderson, vice president innovation & informatics strategy at ACD/Labs. “By listening to the digital aspirations of project teams and scientific leaders, we’ve expanded the capabilities of Katalyst to address the most pressing challenges in pharmaceutical development. Our goal is to empower organisations to digitalise and accelerate the design-make-test-analyse (DMTA) cycle in pharmaceutical R&D.”
Originally designed to streamline high throughput experimentation (HTE) workflows, the newest release of Katalyst D2D software (version 25.4) supports a wider variety of study DMTA cycles for process development—both synthetic route optimisation and process scale-up—and material characterisation studies. Pharmaceutical development project teams will now be able to use Katalyst to rapidly develop and validate processes for manufacturing, accelerating the journey from discovery to clinical trials.
Katalyst D2D is differentiated in the scientific informatics space by its comprehensive integration with third-party informatics systems, laboratory automation and execution hardware, and analytical instrument data. By managing experimental data across workflows, Katalyst reduces transcription errors and provides rich context for experimental results. The software supports automated experiment execution by generating machine-ready instruction lists for robotics platforms (and instruction lists for manual steps); automated processing of analytical data (e.g., LC/MS, LC/UV, NMR, XRPD, thermal, microscopy); and import and management of data from a wide range of laboratory instruments. The new release imports in-situ sampling data from lab reactors and a variety of laboratory instruments including IR/Raman, TGA, DSC, and Karl Fischer Titrators. The ability to assemble the large variety of data collected in process development studies with experimental context ensures data integrity and traceability, and empowers scientists to make decisions with all the relevant data, in one place and in a standardised format.
Katalyst users can design CMC studies manually or leverage integrable third-party AI tools to guide their design of experiments (DoE). Additionally, the structured, contextualised data assembled and managed by Katalyst is used by scientists for cross-experiment analysis and advanced data science (AI/ML) applications.
“Scientists want to leverage as much automation as possible to increase the pace of experimentation,” said Alex Waked, Solution Area Manager, Katalyst D2D. “This latest Katalyst release supports a wide variety of important experiment modalities, and, with different project teams now able to work in the same software, scientists are empowered to share data and collaborate more easily. Ultimately, this will help organisations digitalise end-to-end workflows and accelerate drug development.”