CAD for Drug Design
Hi all! I've been using Convex as our backing DB for a tool we've been working on for a while. I'm working with a biotech that's on track to entire phase 1 clinical trials with a novel therapeutic for leukemia and through our journey we built some internal tech to help improve our computational modeling.
Over time, we decided to spin it off as a standalone product. The focus right now is mostly around white boarding and structuring information (IE: are the structural biologists looking at the problem in a way that creates blind spots your chemist might notice?)
The goal is to make it a communication tool initially, but then help inform and guide early phase biotech R&D. Our focus is very much on preclinical work to try and prevent unnecessary experiments in lab.
Anyway, figured I'd share progress here. Convex ended up fitting like a glove for our use case.
Encoding state for proteins, molecules, etc is pretty complicated. We built an entity component system (ECS) around Convex that lets us basically add components on the fly and allows the consumer of the data to be more opinionated than the producer. In other words, we don't need a complex unified data model to represent the protein / molecule. Instead we have a convex table representing each component of the entity and infer the entity type from the components available.
Tbh, Convex is the only reason we were able to get something this complex into a real time DB since otherwise we'd have to spend ages wrestling with an ORM, table structures, sql, etc.
May end up writing a blog post on how we did ECS with convex for this use case, since it's pretty interesting.
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Here's a video (apologies, uncompressed so it's pretty big)
You'll notice at the end the card on the canvas doesn't load, we're being rate limited by a public data provider for these structures. Working on a fix for that 🙃
It's super early stages. Will be a while before it's ready even for an alpha, figured I'd share anyway
Just Realized we have a mutual friend, This looks pretty intresting! I might not be a chemist but I can see potential for this in Engineering tools, Great job!! You might be one of the people whom might benifit from the #local-sync
very cool. i'd love to read about how you went about implementing it.
We built an entity component system (ECS) around Convex that lets us basically add components on the fly and allows the consumer of the data to be more opinionated than the producer.i've been thinking about this since you mentioned it last time. i explored something approaching this idea some time ago, when thinking about representing graph-like structures in convex. i've been looking for an excuse to try it again, maybe by adding ReactThreeFiber into the mix i'll come up with something...