If you missed our webinar with Collaborative Drug Discovery and Octant, you can view the recording here.
We were joined by our guests Dr. Tao Zheng and Dr. Marco Falcioni of Octant, a customer of both CDD Vault® and Torx® Software. Along with Torx Senior Applications Scientist Mari Goldsmith and CDD’s Customer Engagement Scientist Dr. Kelly Bachovchin, they discussed Octant’s implementation of Torx and CDD Vault in their DMTA (Design-Make-Test-Analyze) discovery workflow, and the benefits that the integration brings them.
About Octant
Octant is a California-based biotechnology company focused on creating new therapies by treating cellular mechanisms that cause disease. They are at the forefront of developing the next generation of small molecule therapeutics, and a key focus of their work is the use of Deep Mutation Scans (DMS) to gain increased insights into how drugs interact with the target proteins. They use external outsourcing for both design and synthesis. They carry out nanogram-scale synthesis and rely on external CRO partners for the hit validation.
About our presenters
Marco Falcioni is a Software Developer with over two decades of experience in cheminformatics, bioinformatics and enterprise software development. He earned his PhD in physics at Syracuse University and completed postdoctoral studies at UCLA. He started his career at Symyx Technologies (now Biovia) working on cheminformatics, LIMS and ELN. In the past decade Marco worked in early startups and larger companies, ranging from clinical human genetics to synthetic biology. Marco joined the Compute team at Octant in early 2023.
Tao Zheng is Torx’s medicinal chemist. She received her PhD in organic chemistry from Michigan State University in 2006 and spent two years at UC Davis as a postdoctoral fellow. She returned to China to begin her career in process chemistry and custom organic synthesis. In 2016, she brought her talents back to the United States, working for Nanosyn, Inc in Santa Clara CA for five years before joining Octant in September 2021.
Mari Goldsmith has over 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry at Lilly, starting off in analytical chemistry, focusing mainly on purification using SFC and prep-LC-MS. Following the completion of her MChem via day release, she transitioned to medicinal chemistry working in therapeutic areas such as pain, endocrine and neuroscience, as well as two secondments in computational chemistry. Mari joined Torx Software in 2021 where she is a Senior Applications Scientist.
Kelly Bachovchin joined the CDD support team to begin her industrial career after completing her PhD in Chemistry at Northeastern University. While at Northeastern, Kelly’s researched focused on synthesizing and optimizing small molecule compounds for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases as part of Professor Michael Pollastri’s lab. Before receiving her PhD, Kelly also obtained a Master’s degree in Biotechnology and Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology, both from Kean University. As a former customer/user of CDD vault, Kelly has experienced first-hand how CDD vault is a powerful and collaborative platform. She wishes to help other scientists to better manage their data and globally connect to further their research as she embarks on her career at CDD.