20 Years of Toronto Based Innovation
Written By Cecilia Li & @LPZolob | Edited by Jason Goodman
TORONTO —
The story of one particular cheminformatics company has impressed and inspired next-generation innovators with its ascent from humble beginnings to international success. With offices now located in places like the UK, Germany, France, India, and China, the company continues to be guided from the Toronto headquarters, where the journey began over twenty years ago.
ACD/Labs was founded by two PhD chemists working in an Advanced Chemistry Development department in 1994. From its early days of developing products for NMR prediction, chemical structure drawing, and physicochemical property prediction, ACD labs has evolved over the past two decades into a global chemistry R&D enterprise for multiple industries including agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and petrochemicals.
ACD/Labs now provides more than 100 different products for multiple industries worldwide, as well as specialized chemistry knowledge management tools and services, all designed for the sake of boosting productivity and harnessing learning through scientific research and development.
Grassroots to Global
Back in the early-mid 1990s, the President and CEO of ACD/Labs, Daria Thorp, identified a market gap between the increasing demand for chemistry drawing software applications and the lack of products available to service such a need. ACD/Labs was initially created to not only fill this specific gap, but to do it by developing software that would be seen as industry leading.
“This company had the fortune and the foresight to enter the market with top-tier products that instantly became popular. But you cannot live on one or two great products alone”,
— ACD/Labs CEO, Daria Thorp
Using a mindset of creating excellence in developing both products and markets, ACD/Labs designed a suite of products that form a more complete solution, and the market responded. The company over the last two decades expanded into new continents — it impressively has over 500 customers in the Asia/Pacific region alone — and now employs over 160 people world wide. Thirty of these anchor the head office in the Greater Toronto area. According to Thorp, “anywhere chemists are involved in research and product development, our software is used” .
“Anywhere chemists are involved in research and product development, our software is used”
— ACD/Labs CEO, Daria Thorp
Core Platforms
Among the product offerings, ACD/Spectrus and ACD/Percepta are among the most popular chemically-intelligent software platforms used today. Both solutions are similar in capabilities, but vary in applications. While ACD/Spectrus focuses on increasing the efficiency of analytical interpretation and managing chemical/analytical knowledge , ACD/Percepta focuses on molecule investigation and characterization for its physicochemical, ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion), and toxicological properties.
ACD/Labs is still using this relatively new foundation to develop more solutions for its customers. “Basically, you have to run to stay in the same spots,” notes Thorp, “We are not pursuing new, totally ‘out of left field’ market initiatives, but are instead building upon our expertise to bring new products close to the advanced stages of commercialization.”
More Products, More Markets
Today, a full range of markets in the development domain use ACD/Labs products to gather insights related to the analytical, chemical, and biological behaviour of organic compounds. These markets include Medicinal and Computational chemists, as well as Preformulation, Cheminformatics, and Agrochemical specialists in high-throughput chemistry and compound acquisition labs.
As recently as August of this year, ACD/Labs announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Interactive Chemical Safety for Sustainability (iCSS) Chemistry Dashboard is now searchable through ACD/ChemSketch. This particular integration enables scientists to draw chemicals on their desktops and access high-quality chemical structures, physicochemical properties, and toxicity information via the EPA Chemistry Dashboard. Antony Williams, a scientist with the EPA, has validated the productivity benefits of a key ACD/Labs platform: “Integration of the ChemSketch drawing package facilitates easy structure-based searching of our Chemistry Dashboard data.”
Product development continues into this year. Earlier in 2016, ACD/Labs announced the launch of MetaSense, an automated metabolite identification platform. This new product combines metabolic transformation prediction with efficient analysis of LC/MS analytical measurements to identify, visualize, and report chemical biotransformations. This product innovation will result in fast, accurate detection of both predicted and unexpected metabolites, empowering scientists as they always have through intelligent software.
The scientific research community is not the only large vertical pursued by the company. Marketplace impact has now extended into the classroom for educational institutions looking to innovate scientific education. Not only is ACD/ChemSketch available for free to some schools and students to create engagement and product familiarization, but now curricula are also starting to more deeply explore the benefits of productivity within scientific processes. A focus on education is seen as highly-strategic for ACD/Labs although not as immediately lucrative as other markets. The company takes a long term approach to developing an affinity for its products and methodologies at an early stage of a scientist’s career, for what it hopes will deliver a lifetime of partnership and revenue.
Leveraging Toronto’s HHS Assets
Back home in the Toronto area, ACD/Labs is an established member of the healthcare science ecosystem, and is seen as a model company for healthcare service and market development. With large and growing local cohorts in healthtech startup companies and a significant academic and scientific community to draw from and incubate, the company will only become more embedded in its home community to the same degree that it penetrates new markets and locations.
Despite emerging global vectors promoting insular thinking in both politics and economics, ACD/Labs is well-positioned in one of the most diverse and forward-thinking communities around the world. Canada, and its most populated region of Greater Toronto, will more than ever be seen as a global center that embraces diversity of background and thought, as it has up until now.
Many successful founded in Toronto move their head offices elsewhere once they’ve achieved a critical mass with their product/business. That’s not the case with ACD/Labs. From their humble beginnings, they could see the systemic HHS and infrastructural assets that would help lay a strong foundation to their success. Aside from the bridge that Toronto offers south of the border to the US, Toronto also boasts a safe, secure and reliable banking system (evidenced by standards like the International Financial Reporting Standards) and an incredibly diverse and skilled immigrant population that together with home grown talent, creates a uniquely specialized talent pool for MedTech driven companies.
Against this background of collaboration and open-mindedness, ACD/Labs stands to be both a local example as well as a beacon of world wide success in science, technology and healthcare, all while maintaining its roots in the community in which it was formed.
About TO Health!
TO Health! is an industry-led cluster organization raising the profile of the Toronto region’s Human Health & Sciences (HHS) cluster. As a facilitator of global opportunities for the cluster, TO Health! collaborates with partners locally and globally to accelerate the growth and impact of the Toronto region.
