QDIS Blog

I must apologize for not posting more but I have been extremely busy with work and have some personal family issues to deal with. I’m hoping to get back into regularly posting on a daily basis later this month but for the next two weeks it will be hit and miss due to an extensive travel schedule.

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

I just want to let regular readers know that I am still posting. I had been out of the office for a few days last week and had posts that were suppose to be automatically posted. That didn’t happen and a have now posted them. I had added them as drafts instead of publishing them as posts. Sorry for the problems.

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

QD Information Services (QDIS) offers a variety of alerting services for anyone needing to stay up to date with rapidly changing information. If you need recurring searches or news following a given company industry or topic, QDIS can provide those results in a variety of formats.

Feel free to contact me with any questions and comments you might have about setting up these alert services for your company.

Technorati Tags: alert service, QDIS

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

I have added Feedblitz to the left column of this blog under Subscribe. Enter your email address hit “Subscribe me” and you will be subscribed to the full feed via email. There is an authentication step to make sure you signed up. This is another easy way to see my posts without having to visit the website. I highly recommend that people subscribe via the RSS feeds but if you don’t want to learn how to do that, you can now subscribe via email. Also, there are no ads or pop ups in this email, just the contents on my posts.

Note that your email address will not be shared or given to anyone other than myself and FeedBlitz. Their privacy policy can be read online. I also will never give your email to anyone. The only time I even see it is if there is some sort of problem with delivery. You can easily identify the email because they will always start with [Feedblitz] in the subject line and be from FeedBlitz@mail.feedblitz.com. The email will be sent once a day and contain all the posts for that day. You can also decide to receive the email in html or plain text by changing your preferences on the Feedblitz site.

Currently only the full feed has been set up. If you have an interest in subscribing to only a certain category via email let me know and I can set it up.

Technorati Tags: Feedblitz

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

This page explains how to use the RSS feeds on this site. RSS stands for for Really Simple Syndication and is a geeky way of saying you can subscribe to this information. RSS feeds allow you to read the stream of text in either an RSS capable browser (Internet Explorer 7.0 or later, Safari 2.0 or later, Firefox 1.5 or later, or other RSS aware browsers) or your favorite RSS reader.

Clicking on RSS or the common feed icon under the section entitled “Subscribe” will give you the full feed with all postings. Below that are several buttons allowing you to subscribe to the full feed in any of the following RSS readers: Google reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines, Newsgator, My MSN, My Feedster, or My AOL.

The next subsection is called “By Category”. These are feeds containng only posting in a given category. If you only want to see “Pharma News” then you can subscribe to a feed containing only posts I’ve marked as belowing to the “Pharma News” category. If you want to subscribe to this category, you can right click (or option click on a Mac) and copy the link and then paste that into your favorite RSS reader.

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

This is my first post to this blog and I thought I’d set out to describe what this blog is all about. First, about the name. QD Information Services is the name of my consulting company with the “QD” coming from the LIbrary of Congress classification for chemistry. This blog will cover issues related to chemistry in general with a focus on organic chemistry and the drug development process since I’ve spent all my professional life working in development. By development, I mean the timeframe after drug discovery up to and including commercialization. So I’ll mention articles related to development, chemistry articles from major journals of interest to me, and general pharmaceutical news. i’ll also cover tips on searching the internet with a focus on finding sources of science and chemistry information.

I’m also a long time Macintosh user so I’ll occasionally mention Mac related software that I think may be of interest as well as the occasional rants. Other tech news such as podcasts and the use of RSS will be mentioned again with a focus on how they apply to science.

If you want to know more about me, read the About Ed Vawter page under internal links on the left. The page About this blog will give a tour of the functionality of this blog setup as well as some of the topics it will cover.

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

The QDIS Blog covers a variety of topics related to science and technology with a focus on chemistry and drug development. It also covers search engine tips and hints, chemistry articles, news, and other items that relate to science and technology.

Here’s a run down on the features of the blog. In the left column, the first section is called “Internal Links”. These links are for major areas of the blog and include a link to the primary website. QDIS Blog Home takes you to the main page for the blog. There also a page about myself and this one about the blog and its features.

Below that are the categories. This gives you only the posts in a certain category. this is useful if you only find certain post of interest to you.

Next is the section “Search Blog”. If you want to find something specifc in this blog this is the way to do it.

Next is “Archives” which will give you acess to all the older posts based on the date they were posted.

The final section on the left is “Subscribe”. This is the area to get the RSS 2.0 feeds. Web feeds are simply a way to subscribe and be notfied automatically when there is new content. The main feed is at the top followed by the comments feed; this feed includes all the comments to all the posts. Then there are the subscribe buttons so you can subscribe to the mani feed in the feed reader of your choice. If your favorite reader isn’t listed, you can right click (or control click on a Mac) and copy the link. Then paste this link into whatever RSS reader you use. Here is more information about the RSS feeds on this site. You can alos subscribe to posts via emial using FeedBlitz. just enter your email address, respond to an emial sent to you to verfiy and then enjoy a daily email with all that days posts.

In the right column at the top is the section “General Links”. This has links to websites of interest to readers of this blog such as the American Chemical Society and other chemistry related sites.

Next is the “Blog Links” section which has links to the web sites of some of the blogs I find interesting and read on a regular basis.

The next two sections are both collections of feeds. These are RSS feeds to either chemistry journals or other chemisdtry related feeds. Clicking on these in non-RSS aware browsers will give a site that doesn’t look friendly. however, you can right click (or control click on Macs) to copy that feed and then paste it into your favorite RSS reader.

The middle section is where the main content is. After each post there is a list of the Technorati tags for this entry. This will take you to Technorati and show what other blogs have used the same tag. after that is an email link to contact the Ed Vawter; it will open a new email in your email application with the title of the post as the subject of the email. Next is Yahoo’s Possibly Related Stuff. This will give you a yahoo search of similar items to the post. It doesn’t always work well but can give interesting results. Next is the possibly related posts. This gives other posts in the blog that are similar. Then there is the bookmarkit section. This is a list of popular social bookmarking sights and automates adding this post to your bookmarks. The last line gives several options. Print This Post gives a printer friendly copy of the post to print out. Email It gives you the opportunity to send the post to someone else you think might be interested in the post. The last two items give you comments and a permanent link to the post.

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |

QDIS was founded in 2003 by Edward Vawter, PhD. We offer a variety of services including consulting, informational searches, and training courses. For those interested, the name comes from the Library of Congress classification code for chemistry information; QD.

About Edward Vawter

Edward Vawter brings well over a decade of experience in research and development in the pharmaceutical industry with both large and small companies. He has a PhD in organic chemistry from Purdue University and has been involved in the synthesis of multi-step complex pharmaceuticals including polymer drug conjugates through all stages of development. He has managed the outsourcing of development and manufacturing for multi-million dollar projects on an international basis. Edward also has five years of experience with development of polymer based drug conjugates as well as extensive analytical development knowledge related to polymers. He has experience with experimental design and data analysis; not only statistical analysis but also exploratory data analysis and building of models to represent behavior of chemical systems. His business experience as well as his solid technical background can help your company succeed.

Work Experience

10/03 to present President, QD Information Services LLC

• Responsible for all areas of operation for a consulting and information services business
• Attract and develop relationships with various potential clients
• Developed business plan for operations of the company
• Provide reports and data for clients on various topics related to science, marketing, and competitive intelligence.

08/98 – 12/03 Senior Staff Chemist, Cell Therapeutics, Inc.

• Responsible for planning the development work for poly-glutamate polymer-paclitaxel conjugate (CT-2103) for four years
• Participated and presented information for several due diligence potential partnerships
• Responsible for manufacturing campaigns under current Good Manufacturing Practice at various vendor sites
• Responsible for initial vendor audit and selection
• Extensive knowledge of the chemistry of Paclitaxel
• Responsible for chemistry manufacturing and controls CT-2103 cross functional group (analytical development, process development, formulation development, quality control, quality assurance, document control, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient manufacturing, Finished Product manufacturing)
• Core team member for CT-2103 (poly-glutamic acid paclitaxel polymer conjugate) on cross functional team (regulatory, marketing, research, preclinical/toxicology, project management, clinical) representing manufacturing, and quality control
• Responsible for three years for multimillion dollar budgets directly related to manufacturing and development; indirectly responsible for tens of millions of budget dollars and came within 3% of budget

04/97 - 08/98 Senior Process Development Chemist, Synthetech

• Designed and refined synthetic schemes for the synthesis of specialty amino acids and peptide building blocks
• Optimized and improved existing synthetic sequences
• Executed synthetic schemes and clarified results both at bench scale as well as pilot plant scale
• Analyzed and interpreted information to decide the further course of projects
• Performed troubleshooting of operations in the pilot plant when problems occurred
• Pilot plant experience (22 L flasks and 50-500 gal reactors)

06/92 – 04/97 Research Scientist, Bristol-Myers Squibb

• Designed and refined synthetic schemes for the synthesis of key targets
• Optimized and improved existing synthetic sequences for utilization in a kilo-lab
• Executed synthetic schemes and clarified results
• Analyzed and interpreted information to decide the further course of projects

Email Ed Vawter

Bookmark it with: | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Simpy | Spurl | My Yahoo! |