Symyx Technologies forms alliance with Pistoia Alliance

Symyx Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:SMMX) today announced it has joined the Pistoia Alliance, a non-profit group that promotes collaboration to streamline non-competitive elements of pharmaceutical and life science discovery workflows. The alliance was initially formed by major global pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and AstraZeneca.

"By enrolling in the Pistoia Alliance, we are taking an active and cooperative position with our customers in their efforts to optimize the drug discovery process," said Dr. Trevor Heritage, president of Symyx's software business unit. "Additionally, through the open-source nature of Pistoia, Symyx's valuable experience working in a variety of markets with thousands of customers on these types of research workflow challenges will be available to other alliance members."

Symyx is participating in the Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) Query Services Working Group that over time will create and release industry standard definitions, a Search application programming interface (API), and a service specification for accessing and reporting ELN information. These cooperative efforts will provide for the current and future digital information needs of Symyx customers, while also helping to establish a set of standard industry use cases that will align life sciences customers and vendors around the challenges of working with information throughout the discovery process.

As a participating member of the Pistoia Alliance, Symyx will collaborate on helping companies increase the value of research information by enabling searching and reporting across the groups, domains, and systems involved in research projects. In today's cost-driven R&D environment, companies realize that working together to capture and discuss emerging ideas can be mutually beneficial.