So, here I am, sitting at my Beijing hotel, late in the evening, ready to fly out to Brazil tomorrow. This visit to China has been a whirlwind, and I have not had time to update the blog, as the opportunity to do so had to compete with, and finally lose to, the chance to get some much needed sleep. The trip has been great, and I have found out a lot of new stuff. I will try to update a couple of times in the next couple of days, with short articles on the time spent at each of the cities I visited.

From right to left, Chen, Hongyu Liu, of TLWB, and Santi ready for business in Shanghai. Click on the photo to view the Shanghai library

Shanghai continued to impress me as a truly bustling Asian metropolis, a city of business and commerce. There I met Mr. Hongyu Liu, the General Manager of TLWB (see previous post), who is a very hard working and organized individual with the hunger for success and commitment to achieving it that one can expect from entrepreneurs in recently prosperous economies. Hongyu also happens to be a thoroughly nice and likeable guy, a great host and a very democratic manager to his team of young and smart employees. I expect great things from these guys.

The week started very well, with a visit to the restored Shikumen district of Xin Tian Di (New Heaven), in the heart of Shanghai, the ‘in’ place for eating, drinking and partying in Shanghai, with a mixture of Western and Oriental style establishments, although perhaps with too much of a bias towards the Western. It is also the location of Paul’s, a very stylish French boulangerie and teahouse with excellent coffee and cakes. After a very nice evening there on the first day, we then worked through the Sunday and finished with dinner at Herbal Legend, in Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, very close to the excellent Parkyard Hotel (Bibo Lu). If you are visiting Shanghai in business, I strongly recommend both. As far as industrial area eateries go, ‘Herbal Legend’ is exceptional, with very good service, life Chinese music most nights and a huge menu of very high quality prepared by Chinese herbal medicine experts, so this is not only good eating, but also good for your health!. On the Monday we visited some companies in the Hi Tech Area, where our software was received with excitement and, on Tuesday, we held a presentation at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, organized by TLWB and attended by more than 40 scientists from different companies and educational and government institutions. The presentation was a great success and gave us very good traction in the Shanghai area, as well as providing an opportunity for me to try out my incipient Chinese. You will be able to see some photos of the presentation and of some of the attendees by clicking on the photo above or on this link.

After this, it was time to make for the airport ready to fly to Beijing, the next stage of the trip. More on that a little later. But first,a  couple other interesting facts about China and particularly the Chemistry and NMR community there and, like many things in China, it is all about numbers.

It turns out that there are more than 1,000 organizations (public and private) doing NMR within China which, for such a technology and capital intensive technique, is a very impressive number and shows how far these guys have come so quickly.

The second is about the Chinese government approach to CRO, pharma and biotech. We visited AQ Biopharma , a biopharmaceutical start up which is sharing a building with a further 60 start ups. All the facilities are owned by the central government, and rented out to these companies in very advantageous conditions. Each of them gets a lab (different sizes available) and an office. On the ground floor of this 6 storey building (and, by the way, there are several of these buildings in one road, at least 4-5 housing around 60 start ups each) there is a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer and some LC/GC/MS equipment, together with NMR and LC/GC/MS experts, available to all users in that building. I have seen similar set ups in the West (for example, the Nexus facility at Santiago de Compostela University) but the amazing thing here once again is the numbers involved. If there are about 300 of these start ups in one road in one city, what are the chances of some of these succeeding?

All this is fuelled by a ready supply of chemists and biochemists, which are being churned out by Chinese Universities at a rate of knots, as these are still very popular subjects for University hopefuls, unlike in the West, where the scarcity of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics graduates is posing a problem. And these scientists are very keen on improving their language skills, one of their self-acknowledged challenges. The Pudong Language School is a building of pharaonic proportions which was already open at 6.30 am, when I ran past it. This is not going to stop us from releasing Mnova in Chinese, though. Mnova is already available in Japanese, Russian and Spanish, as well as English, and it is prepared so that it is very easy to ‘localize’ to other languages. If any of you have any other suggestions on possible languages Mnova should support, please use the comments to let us know.

OK, next post, Beijing.

Santi Trips and business development, Uncategorized Mestrelab, mestrelab china, mnova china, shanghai 3 comments Leave a comment

There are very conflicting theories at the moment as to the role of Marco Polo and Admiral Zheng He in medieval times in the coming together of the Western European and Chinese cultures, and who discovered who. You could do worse than checking out 1434, by Gavin Menzies, to read some alternative history.

I am now following on the trail of Marco Polo, but of course I have no pretensions of discovering China, rather, we are trying hard in Mestrelab to get China to discover Mnova, so far with a relatively pleasing measure of success. Before I get into matters Mestrelab, though, there are a few really amazing things one finds out on arriving in Shanghai, which is an incredibly modern and buzzing city. I was here last November, and I was really taken by surprise by the speed of the developments in this area of China.

The first incredible thing is the district of Pudong, on the East shore of the Yang-Tze river. This was basically farmland 10 years ago, which is truly incredible when you see it now, as the people of Shanghai have built 12,000 (yes, 12,000!) skyscrapers since then in this new part of town. One of them, the Shanghai World Financial Center, I believe to be the 2nd tallest in the World at present, and many others are hugely imposing and spectacular buildings. The realization that all this has sprung from nowhere in 10 years really gives the newcomer a measure of the power of aspiration of the Chinese society in economic terms.

Santi in Shanghai, with the Pu-Dong skyline behind, last November (2008). Click on the photo to view more from the Shanghai album

The next thing that catches your eye is downtown Shanghai. Buzzing with commercial activity, spectacular with a beautiful (and incredibly contrasting from one shore to the other) skyline, and no end of places for the visitor to go to, great restaurants, exciting nightlife, modern facilities. A true metropolis of the XXI century. Check out a few photos, unfortunately spoilt by me and Chen, by clicking on the photo to the left.

The second incredible thing in Shanghai is the Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, and in particular what guys over here call Pharma Valley (I guess in a reference to the very notorious Silicon Valley in CA, US) Pharma Valley is a huge sprawl of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies which have sprung up in Pudong in the last 5 years. It takes close on half an hour to cross it in a taxi and, although I have heard different estimates, it would appear that there are between 100,000 and 250,000 chemists and biologists currently working in and around it. For anyone working in this industry, this is a mind boggling number. Of course, for me, marketing software desktop licenses, this is a sleep depriving piece of information! It is in any case fascinating and I am very lucky to have seen it and happy to have visited it. I think anyone working in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries should do so sometime. The visit is so exciting, that I was inspired to start learning Mandarin after last time (I am still working on that, although with very little time which makes progress frustratingly slow)

The good news for Mestrelab is that we already have some customers in Pharma Valley, people like Alputon Inc. and Hutchison MediPharma Limited, as well as a number of Chinese universities (University of Tsinghua, South China Botanic Garden, Institute of Materia Medica Beijing, National Chiao Tung University, Beijing Institute of Chemistry, Fudan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Defence Medical Center) who are the early adopters of our software. After this visit, I hope to have many more. This week I am going to Shanghai and Beijing, as well as Qingdao. Chen is staying over for nearly a month, and I am sure he will make further progress (for one thing, his Chinese is much better than mine!). We also now have a distribution company working with us, Qingdao Tenlong Weibo Technology Company Ltd. These guys are very professional and hard working, and they will be developing the business for us in China, as they already have a very strong presence in the Chinese chemical R&D market. Qingdao is famous for its beer and its beaches, but maybe there will soon another reason!

I am going to be here for a week, after which I cross the World to go to Brazil (more on that on oncoming posts). I hope to post some photos of the city later in the week and, hopefully, some news on business progress. I may even come up with a little ‘my guide to Shanghai’ assuming I get time to find some good places to visit, eat, drink (not necessarily in that order).

Santi Trips and business development business development, China, Mestrelab in China, Mnova en China No comments Leave a comment

Visit to eMolecules

From left to right, Craig James (eMolecules), Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and Santi Dominguez (Mestrelab) in Del Mar, by the eMolecules office. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

So, as part of our trip to California a few weeks ago, immediately prior to the ENC, we also visited eMolecules. I omitted this on that previous post to avoid overloading it, and also because I wanted to allow some more room to discuss what these guys are doing (in our opinion, extremely well).

Of course, the first great thing about visiting eMolecules is their location, in Del Mar, CA. This is a beautiful area just North of San Diego, with a spectacular beach. The eMolecules office as well as Klaus’ house enjoy stunning views. Combine this with the great restaurant and bar offer in Del Mar and we were obviously very happy there.
However, the most pleasing thing was meeting with the eMolecules team and hearing of the great progress eMolecules are making. Their star Cheminformatics product, eMolecules Plus, is now gaining excellent acceptance in the biotech and pharma industries, with several high profile adopters (not sure I am allowed to mention them here, so I will not, you could probably find them in the eMolecules web site somewhere, but some of them really are major players). If the Cheminformatics guys in your organization are not using eMolecules Plus, you should send them to the eMolecules Plus product page to take a look. They could find it very interesting.

The other great bit of news is that eMolecules is really succeeding at creating a great ecommerce solution for people buying screening blocks. They now allow you access to all major screening block suppliers in a ‘one-stop’ screening blocks e-commerce interface (I cannot link a demo here as it is not quite ready, we show a late alpha and it is very impressive. I will let you know as soon as it is available) which you can combine with many of the listing and searching features in eMolecules and eMolecules Plus to save outrageous amounts of time and effort in the procurement of screening blocks. I know one of their customers just managed to place an order for over 3,500 different compounds in one single process, and anyone who has tried to purchase a large variety of screening blocks in the past will know how useful this is. I believe they saved over a man-month!!! Now, what would you, or I, do with one extra month?. So, once again, I would point the people who buy screening blocks at your organization in the direction of the eMolecules ecommerce system – at this point, what they need to do is to contact Niko directly (niko@emolecules.com) as the general demo site is not quite up and running as explained above. Your purchasing guys will be forever in your debt, and you will be able to claim the favour some time later, I am sure!

From left to right Craig James (eMolecules), Carlos Cobas (Mestrelab) & Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and, behind them, the Pacific Ocean. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

Finally, and not really related, we also heard while we were there that Niko just got a paper accepted in Science! Now, that is something you don’t hear from people everyday, so congratulations to Niko, these guys make good software but also do good science!

Santi Mestrelab cheminformatics, eMolecules, eMolecules Plus, partners, screening blocks No comments Leave a comment