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Cresset Consulting - What Makes a Great Consulting Project?

In this series of blogs, Dr Martin Slater, Director of Consulting Services, talks about what ingredients contribute to the success of a consulting project.

There are three key ingredients vital to the success of a consulting project. First and foremost is the expertise of the consulting team. Second is the quality of the software and the reliability of the science used to deliver the results. Third, and the one variable that changes with each project, the success of a collaboration can hinge on the quality of communication between the customer and the team.

Great People Make a Great Consulting Project

Perhaps it sounds surprising, but I would always put the expertise of the consulting team before the software. Of course, they are both important, and you cannot perform computational chemistry without proven scientific computational methods. But we are talking about scientific research, and it takes excellent scientists to deliver excellent science.

We don’t carry out research by putting a postgraduate in front of a screen so they can input data then tell customers what the software tells them. What Cresset offer our customers is years of combined scientific expertise from a world class computational chemistry team.

Our customers are typically small to medium size companies who do not have the resources to build a dedicated in-house computational chemistry team. They could perhaps choose to hire one computational chemist to work with their medicinal chemists, but this could really limit the breadth of the computational chemistry they can deploy.

Our team of scientists have experience in structural biology, medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry and cheminformatics. Together they have over 100 years of combined industry experience on a very wide range of biological targets and therapeutic areas. In fact, because of our range of consulting projects and industry backgrounds, our team typically has much greater experience than most in-house pharmaceutical computational chemistry teams.

We work on projects from scaffold hopping and ligand based virtual screening, fragment replacement, fragment growth and SAR analysis including 3D QSAR using fields. The following diagram shows the wide range of fields in which Cresset consultants have worked.

And this experience matters. Computational chemistry is not magic, it is science. Scientific tools need scientists to provide intelligent input and interpret the results. It is Cresset’s expertise and depth of experience that really deliver results for our customers.