David Klatte (Pfizer) presented on this potential new working group during the "Dragons' Den" portion of the Pistoia Alliance Conference in Boston, MA, on April 24, 2012.

1. Dragon’s Den – David Klatte

2. CTAB Files – A De Facto Standard

3. Imagine a World Without MOL
 Chemical tools couldn’t talk to each other.
 CROs would require custom formats (or pharma
companies would have to design a format and require
it of them)
 Acquiring a large compound file would be a
nightmare

5. There Is A Better Way
 HELM: A Hierarchical Editing Language for
Macromolecules
 Intuitive, Hierarchical, Extensible, Computer Readable,
Canonicalizable (and there are tools!)

6. Why a Pistoia Standard?
 More complex than CTAB/MOL/SD.
 Extensible means there is more than one way to do
things. One way needs to be agreed upon.
 Pistoia is best positioned to publicize a standard.
 A de facto standard for macromolecules would not
work.

7. ROI
 Pharma invests less time figuring out how to interact
with CROs for macromolecules.
 Software companies have a representation they can
use for interoperability.
 Tools already exist. Everything won’t need to be
written from scratch.
 Most of the hard work has been done already. Let’s
prove that Pistoia can create a standard.