Case Study: MDL Information Systems achieves faster drug discovery with Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL

Allegro CL and Afferentä by MDL Information Systems, Inc. help pharmaceutical companies create new drugs faster

MDL Information Systems, Inc. needed to help pharmaceutical customers explore enormous combinatorial chemistry libraries—ranging from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of compounds—by simulating reactions, controlling lab robots, and narrowing candidates early to reduce time and cost in drug discovery. To build this capability, MDL developed the Afferent product suite on Allegro CL provided by Franz Inc.

Franz Inc.’s Allegro CL (used in Afferent 5.0.1 on Windows) supplied the Lisp/CLOS platform for a three‑layer architecture (object model, UI, application logic) that supports virtual chemistry, robot control, complex structure/property searching, and Oracle-backed persistence via the MOP. Using Allegro CL enabled MDL to process very large libraries, deliver a responsive, search‑rich UI for chemists, rapidly evolve the codebase and create new apps like Apex—thereby improving throughput and accelerating early‑stage candidate reduction (the case study describes scope and qualitative impact but does not give specific numeric savings).

MDL Information Systems

Michael Travers

Principal Software Engineer