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.
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.
