Elsevier MDL
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Elsevier MDL is a subsidiary of Elsevier. It develops programs that aid in "discovery informatics", or the use of computers modeling of scientific information in ways that lead to new pharmaceutical and chemistry discoveries.
The company was founded as Molecular Design Limited in 1978. It produces widely used programs such as ISIS and Chime. The three founders, Stuart Marson and Stephen Peacock (both UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellows) and W. Todd Wipke (a professor at UC Santa Cruz) started the company as a computer-aided drug design consultancy, but soon realized that there was more customer interest in the tools they had created for manipulating chemical structures in computers than in their consultancy efforts, and they switched to making products: the first MDL product MACCS (Molecular ACCess System) was shipped in 1979, and the first customers were Chevron's Ortho Division (Richmond, CA), Shell (Modesto, CA), and FMC Corporation (Princeton, NJ).
This was followed in 1982 by REACCS (REaction ACCess System), and then MDL's first molecule and reaction databases Fine Chemicals Directory, Organic Syntheses, and Theilheimer. MDL kept pace with technology, introducing a PC-based product suite, Chemist's Personal Software Series, in 1985, and a client-server, heterogeneous database integration product, ISIS (Integrated Scientific Information System), in 1991.
MDL's customer base continued to grow, and by 1984, it had 100 customer installations, and customers had formed the first MDL Users' Group. To operate near its customers, MDL opened offices in New Jersey, Switzerland, and the UK, and signed Fujitsu as its Japanese distributor.
MDL was part of the Maxwell Communications conglomerate from 1987 to 1992, and was then publicly traded on the NASDAQ stock market in 1993 as MDL Information Systems, Inc. MDL acquired Occupational Health Services, Inc. in 1994, and in 1997 was itself acquired by Reed Elsevier. MDL remains part of Elsevier, the scientific and medical division of Reed Elsevier, and in 2004 changed its trading name to Elsevier MDL.
Other alliances and acquisitions continued to round out MDL's product offerings. The Elsevier acquisition of Beilstein Information Systems in 1998 allowed MDL to market the prestigious CrossFire Beilstein database, followed soon after by CrossFire Gmelin. MDL also acquired Interactive Simulations, Inc. (a San Diego molecular modeling company), Afferent Systems, Inc. (a San Francisco combichem tools company), and SciVision, Inc. (a Burlington QSAR company).
MDL's product offerings kept pace with advances in discovery techniques, with MDL Screen for high throughput screening, and Project Library and Central Library for combinatorial chemistry: and with newer technologies, with MDL Chime for handling structures on the Web, and Relational Chemical Gateway for storing structures in Oracle® databases.
Elsevier MDL has been at the forefront of discovery informatics for over 25 years and continues to offer its life sciences customers a complete and evolving data management and integration solution complemented by detailed scientific data and information that powers the process of invention.
Elsevier MDL now operates from 12 sites on three continents, with approximately 430 staff, and has over 50,000 users of server-based products at 500 installations. In 2004 Elsevier MDL in Tokyo took over distribution and support of MDL products in Japan with an expanded organization to manage all customer-facing activities in Japan.
Since 2002 MDL has introduced:
- The DiscoveryGate® environment for integrating, indexing and linking scientific information
- The xPharm® database of pharmacological information, linking agents, targets, disorders and principles
- The MDL® Patent Chemistry Database indexing chemical reactions, substances and related information from organic chemistry and life science patent publications (World, U.S. and European) since 1976
- The MDL® Isentris® platform, the first out-of-the-box, n-tier discovery informatics architecture specifically designed for life sciences researchers, consisting of the revolutionary MDL® Base user interface, MDL® Draw chemical drawing and rendering software, MDL® Core Interface middle tier with Integrating Data Source and the MDL® Direct chemical data cartridges for molecules and reactions
- MDL® Logistics integrated materials management solution built on the Isentris platform
- MDL® Notebook, a new generation electronic data capture, auditing, tracking, storing, sharing and reporting solution built on Isentris
[edit] See also
Computational chemistry, QSAR, data mining
