The Pistoia Alliance and Scilligence Corporation are pleased to announce the release of the HELM Web Editor, which brings HELM’s industry standard biomolecular representation to the browser, greatly enhancing the deployability of the technology for its adopters.
As the therapeutic utilization of complex and unique biomolecules has become commonplace in drug discovery R&D, scientists have struggled to represent these entities in their information systems, forcing them to use various “pick and mix” approaches that include multiple nomenclatures and textual descriptions. HELM, the open biomolecular representation standard, has solved this problem by providing a means to represent various types of complex macromolecules (e.g. nucleotides, proteins, antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates) including those that contain non-natural elements such as chemically modified amino acids.
The Pistoia Alliance formalized the HELM notation, originally created by Pfizer scientists as an open standard in early 2013, and publicly released the related software toolkit and editor to the Open Source community. Since its release, HELM has benefited from a growing ecosystem of global adopters and contributors including organizations such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, GSK, Ionis, Merck and Co, Scilligence, NextMove Software, ACD/Labs, Arxspan, BioChemfusion, Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA, ChemAxon, Perkin-Elmer, quattro research, EMBL-EBI, NCBI (PubChem), and RDKit.
While the original HELM Applet editor, supporting HELM Notation 1.0 and developed using Java, made it easier for scientists to draw and view macromolecules, technology evolved, leaving the applet unsupported by many browsers. The new HELM Web Editor is completely built on JavaScript, which removes dependencies and increases the compatibilities with modern browsers.
