

The chemical inventory arena is a familiar one for ChemSW, a chemical software company with more than 2000 installations worldwide. This review contains a sampling of such programs, but there are numerous customized solutions and other types of tracking software that can be used for chemical inventory tracking (see ta ble, ∼hemical Inventory System Vendors). The problem of managing the inventory and tracking the characteristics of such a large number of compounds has increased dramatically.įortunately, there are a number of chemical inventory software packages on the market, ranging from very flexible general purpose programs to those written as custom software programs for a particular industry or company. But in the new drug discovery process, hundreds of thousands of compounds may be needed or generated in a given year. The number of chemical compounds used by pharmaceutical companies a few years ago was limited to a few thousand per year. Now, most companies use multiple techniques such as high-throughput screening, robotics, and combinatorial chemistry to generate as wide an array of chemical compounds as possible with the ultimate goal of finding just a few compounds that show promise. Things have changed significantly over the past decade, most importantly in the evolution of the drug discovery practice in pharmaceutical and biochemical companies. Not too many years ago, the problem of managing a chemical storehouse might have been considered a challenge, but one that could be solved with a reasonable amount of software acumen, most likely involving a mainframe database and customized programming. Cant find that reagent? More and more software packages and solutions are available to help.
