My mother was a voracious reader and was forever borrowing books from or lending them to the members of her widely-read circle friends. You were just as likely to see Jacqueline Suzanne, Frederick Forsythe, or Simon Wiesenthal on our bookshelves as you would see Samuel Pepys or Daniel Defoe.
I was reminded of this fact earlier this year when once again Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” began to creep back onto the national reading lists of people stuck in their homes. If you had told me a year ago, that we would find ourselves reacting in much the same way as the citizens of London, 400 years ago, I would have scoffed.
But as much as we have been dismayed by some, we’ve been encouraged and amazed by the strength, resiliency and ingenuity of others. The first reports of COVID-19 began to be circulated in November and December of last year, and by early January we had the first sequence.
By February, as reports of outbreaks began to emerge in the US, Africa and South America, Moderna announced they were shipping their first drug candidate to patients enrolled in their Phase I/II study. Gilead announced that they were recruiting patients for Phase III studies of Remdesivir. To go from a sequence to a drug candidate in a month is just an unheard of pace of development. What was perhaps just as unheard of, was to do this using a previously little known class of drugs known as mRNA therapeutics.
By March, the US began to see 100,000 cases, and California experienced its first shutdown as it became evident that 7 strains were in circulation. It was about this time that we began to receive calls from a number of drug discovery companies looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their research operations. We began collecting and disseminating best practices, while working with our customers to answer the question — “now that we’re limiting the amount of face-to-face time we spend, how can we keep our projects on track and make the most of the limited time we have available in the lab?”
Beyond sharing best practices though, Aspen employees have continuously monitored the news and shared relevant information through our social networks on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in an effort to keep our followers up to date.
In May, Moderna announced that it had promising preliminary Phase I data. And by November we had over 500 drug candidates from companies like Moderna, Gilead, Pfizer/BioNTech, Inovio and many others. We have also seen 3 different classes of diagnostics emerge in the same timeframe.
This year we anticipate at least 2 EUAs, with more to follow next year. Much of the success this year has been down to process improvements that made for more effective collaborations, and made it easier to scale the work that researchers have to do.
In addition to helping customers with new ELN implementations, and system integration projects, we’ve been working with early access customers on the latest release of Pharm2Market, our business intelligence platform for biotechs. This release, currently slated for January 2021 will include support for two new biotech communities in Boston and the Mid-Atlantic region. We’ve also integrated contact data from Rocket Reach and revamped the user interface, the portfolio view, and news aggregation capabilities, making it easier than ever to find new customers and understand their business.
This was also our first year to participate in the Molecular Tri-Med Conference/BioITWorld West in February, where we demonstrated the latest version of Pharm2Market and presented a poster on using metadata to improve pharmaceutical collaborations.
We updated our website and published a number of new whitepapers to help customers understand some of the lessons learned from our ELN projects. We also created whitepapers to provide Pharm2Market customers with insights on the latest developments in their communities.
This year, though, has been about more than just helping our customers. It’s also been about helping our communities. Aspen employees have been working hard to help individuals and families who continue to be in the high-risk groups for COVID-19 infection. In addition to shopping and delivering groceries for elderly or other high-risk people in our neighborhoods who need assistance, our employees have also volunteered their time and contributed to feeding those less fortunate through church organizations, shelters, and food banks.
This year in particular we expect more children will be facing a very lean Christmas, so we are also donating what we can to our local Toys for Tots, a top-rated charity where over 97% of the donations go to their mission of providing toys, books, and other gifts to less fortunate children. If you are able to help through a donation to Toys for Tots this year, please visit this link https://www.toysfortots.org/. Or donate to Feeding America.