Controlled Substances Compliance Expert Community Established

Wilmington, DE, 11th August 2014 - The Pistoia Alliance Controlled Substances Compliance Services (CSCS) project has made it significantly easier for life science companies to comply with controlled substance legislation by establishing an expert community to interpret the often-ambiguous rules.

Controlled substances, depending on the local, national or international situation, include narcotics, psychotropics, controlled drug precursors and anabolic steroids. It is vitally important to comply with all legislation controlling the production, import/export, supply, use and possession of these substances in order to maintain the safety and security of everyone.

The Pistoia Alliance CSCS project, which has already successfully delivered two commercially available compliance checking services by ChemAxon/Patcore (http://www.chemaxon.com/products/compliance-checker/) and Scitegrity (http://www.scitegrity.co.uk/index.php?page=cs2), found value in bringing together a group of experts from pharmaceutical and technology companies across the world to identify and review local, national and international controlled substance legislation. This group of experts has now been formally established as the CSCS Expert Community (http://www.cscs-experts.org) in order to build on the successes so far.

The CSCS Expert Community will meet monthly to discuss the latest developments in controlled substance legislation and guide its interpretation. Between meetings, groups of Community members will get involved with developing test datasets for extended coverage, establishing relationships with the regulators, creating compound annotation standards, and generating novel ideas for related projects.

Derek Wilson, Project Leader for the Pistoia Alliance CSCS Expert Community and Controlled Substance Coordinator at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said: “The ambiguities of controlled substance legislation make it difficult to form a definitive interpretation alone. The collective effort of the CSCS Expert Community will greatly ease the process of defining compliance, ironing out the uncertainties involved and enabling all Pistoia Alliance members to enhance the safety, security and compliance of their research environment.”

The CSCS Expert Community is open to all Pistoia Alliance members to join, participate in the discussions and deliberations, and access its findings. The next meeting will take place on 27th August 2014. New members are always welcome and all those interested should email Anne Dunlop ([email protected]) for further information.

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For further information, please contact:
Tony Stephenson
Exitus Communications (on behalf of the Pistoia Alliance)
Tel: +44 (0)7899 796655
Email: [email protected]

About the Pistoia Alliance

The Pistoia Alliance is a not-for-profit, cross-company, members’ organization, formally incorporated in the State of Delaware. It is committed to lowering the barriers to innovation in life sciences R&D by improving the interoperability of R&D business processes through precompetitive collaboration. It draws its membership widely from life science R&D including Pharma R&D, commercial information providers, technology companies and publicly-funded research institutes. The Pistoia Alliance creates a virtual, open-innovation community by bringing together the key stakeholders to identify the root causes that lead to life science R&D inefficiencies and then develops best practices, technology implementations and standards to overcome these common obstacles. For further information about the Pistoia Alliance please visit our website, http://www.pistoiaalliance.org/.

About ChemAxon

ChemAxon (http://www.chemaxon.com/) is a leader in providing cheminformatics software platforms and desktop applications for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.  With core capabilities for structure visualization, search and management, property prediction, virtual synthesis, screening and drug design, ChemAxon focuses upon active interaction with users and software portability to create powerful, cost effective cross platform solutions that power modern cheminformatics and chemical communication.  The company is privately owned with European headquarters in Budapest, US East Coast headquarters in Cambridge, MA, and sales and support offices in Europe, Japan and across North America.

About Patcore Inc.

Patcore is based in Tokyo, providing cheminformatics software and services for Pharmaceutical and life science industries. Patcore was founded in 2003 and signed with ChemAxon in 2005 as an exclusive partner in Japan. Patcore successfully developed CRAIS series using ChemAxon technologies to help users to manage chemical and biological data more efficiently. These products are well accepted by many clients and Patcore has provided them for 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in Japan to date. Compliance Checker (formerly known as CRAIS Checker) has been developed by Patcore in 2005 and is already used by more than thirty Japanese companies.

About Scitegrity

Scitegrity Ltd is based out of Discovery Park http://discovery-park.co.uk/ in the United Kingdom. Scitegrity’s founders have many years of experience working in the pharmaceutical industry, both as practicing scientists and as data and application experts supporting scientists. This blend of science, data and IT enables Scitegrity to provide customers with incisive consultancy and innovative software products. For more information on Scitegrity’s CSCS product, Controlled Substances Squared (CS2), please visit our website http://www.scitegrity.com/ or contact us via email [email protected] with any questions or to arrange a demonstration.