Company compliance with regulations on compounds such as narcotics, psychotropic drugs, explosives, hazardous materials and toxic agents is a key topic in the chemical and life sciences industry. Incorrect handling of such compounds may result in serious consequences.
Compliance Checker is a combined software system and content package providing a way to check whether your compounds are controlled according to the relevant laws of the countries of interest.
Use Compliance Checker to gain knowledge on your controlled substances
Pharmaceutical companies and other life science R&D organizations must have adequate controls in place to meet the production, possession or import/export regulations of their compounds relevant in the corresponding countries. By any chance when the company violates laws, regulations or ordinances, it may cause the loss of company reputation and sales, and can also result in financial and criminal penalties. Legislation covering controlled substances exists at local, national and international levels, and varies widely in their forms and frequency of updates.
Compliance Checker enables you to remain compliant in this rapidly changing legislation environment.
Serving a large variety of users and purposes
Compliance Checker is a set of web services, that can be directly accessed using its API, which is the major way of use for integration purposes. The system also has a user interface that runs in any major browser types. Most of the users will access the system through this GUI.
The API
If you want to integrate Compliance Checker into your Compound registration or into your ELN, or into any other system that can call out for a web service, you will use the Integration API that gives you several choices to land the compliance information for any compound in your proprietary system or database. A Pipeline Pilot node is also available for integration purposes.
The GUI
The system has a user interface which provides single check and batch check capabilities for standard users, and an administration interface for power users.
We describe briefly the three different interfaces below:
Single check
Single check provides a quick and easy way to check a single molecule. You can simply enter the molecule name, SMILES or CAS number, select from the predefined countries, and hit enter. The results are provided instantaneously, where you can dynamically change the report fields, and can export it into various file formats. The structure can also be drawn using the Marvin JS molecule editor, or can be entered into the input box in a wide variety of file formats. Besides the default countries you can also choose from the Check Levels that your administrator created selecting from the available regulation categories.
User defined levels:
Batch check
Batch check enables to check multiple structures at the same time. All common file types are accepted (SDF, Mrv, SMILES, names) for upload, and many report types can be selected for output. The batch check page is a history as well, where you can see the summary of any previous run, download any available report, or create a new one from the results.
Administration
For power users /administrators/ there is a specific user interface to create new rules and re-define check levels based on geographic and duty based groupings of legislation. This user interface also enables to manage updates and monitor the web services.
Performance
The performance of Compliance Checker ensures seamless integration into any enterprise environment: it checks one hundred molecules per second on a medium size Amazon server, and due to its almost linear scale up with CPU or number of computation servers, it can fulfill any realistic requirements.
Knowledge Base
Compliance Checker uses a knowledge base containing rules carefully extracted from the regulations. The rules in the knowledge base are represented as chemical query structures. The judgment mechanism of the system relies on the chemical search of JChem which compares the substances to be checked and the rules in form of query structures.
Further refinement is embedded in the checking process to include e.g. the isomeric forms, salts, and filter out the exception cases.
Information Resources
Compliance Checker relies on an up to date and extensive knowledge base made up of relevant published legislation covering most of the North American and Japanese ones and part of the most important European ones (e.g. US Controlled Substance Act, UK Misuse of Drugs Act, United Nations Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods, The Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade (PIC), Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer). The corresponding resources are continuously monitored and new regulations immediately extracted to make them available in the system as soon as possible.
We are open to extend legislative and geographic coverage on request, as well as create rules from internal regulations specific for a company. The proprietary knowledge base stored on the client server is automatically merged to the regularly updated Compliance Checker knowledge base.
Availability
Compliance Checker is available in 3 flavors: It can be purchased as a complete software-data package for in-house deployment, or pre-deployed it on a server maintained by ChemAxon (preferably in the cloud), or as a hosted service where either we provide a login for you to access or, under NDA conditions, we take lists of your structures and provide reports back to you on demand.