Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
This week I visited Accelrys, a University of Cambridge spin-out with a European R&D unit that helps materials scientists share their work. The company is now headquartered in San Diego, and has grown through merger and acquisition of a series of companies from Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds and elsewhere, so we are fortunate that the European unit employs 120 people here.
The ability to simulate, visualise and share molecular structures with teams around the world has been important in pharmaceuticals for a while. Accelrys is being used in 20 of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, each with hundreds of expert users producing simulations or storing chemical data that may be consumed by tens of thousands of colleagues through web services. It has become the world's favourite way of encoding stereochemical information and storing it in Oracle or Excel. Partners providing workflow and data management for chemicals or pharmaceuticals companies include Microsoft and Deloitte.
The company is enjoying steady growth in materials modelling, helping oil and gas majors with catalysis and other members like Johnson Matthey on fuel cells. With a lot of the most innovative chemicals companies still located in Germany, a European focus on materials makes sense. They have a pattern of scientific collaborations with mainly European universities working on visualising and simulating molecular structures for materials, including several with the University of Cambridge.
It reminded me of another member ARM, a company that was able to provide common microprocessor architectures to clients around the world because of widespread adoption of Electronic Design Automation software. EDA was developed by big,vertically integrated microchip companies to simulate performance of microchips in design phase, share that information around the world and streamline the workflow to get a product to market faster. But once it was in place and working effectively, much smaller companies like ARM could also play an important role without having to own the fabrication plants.
How will improved simulation change the world of chemicals and materials? We're lucky to have one of the companies driving that change from here, still incorporating Cambridge ideas that change the world.
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