1.23.2 Patch, Nanome roadmap for the rest of 2022, and Nanome 2.0
We’ve come a long way since we’ve launched Nanome 1.0, and we’re excited to announce that we are now working hard on Nanome 2.0, coming in late 2023.
If you haven’t done so already, please update to 1.23.2 which contains various bug fixes and UI tweaks!
Written by Keita Funakawa & Sam Hessenauer
A recap of how today’s Nanome came to be
Nanome 1.0 was launched in 2018 after many many different prototypes that initially began back in 2015. After 50+ customer interviews and one key collaboration with Novartis GNF in 2017, one thing was clear: Nanome had to have many features in order to seamlessly integrate into scientist workflows.
Through biweekly and monthly meetings with pilot customers, we rapidly built features to satisfy the never-ending list of customer requests.Often, when we would demo a scientist new to Nanome, we’d constantly get a list of questions like “this is amazing, but can you do ___ (critical structural biology, computational/medicinal chemistry related feature)?” and our answer was “not, yet, but soon(TM)!”
Fast forward to our latest version, v1.23, released in late 2021, and Nanome has become a powerful interface for scientific discovery, specifically for drug discovery scientists. Scientists can collaborate in real-time in VR/MR regardless of where they are on the planet. Nanome users can also leverage their existing computational solutions via Nanome Stacks, our plugin system. Many of our answers to the questions about features have changed from “not yet” to “YES!” Even when the feature they’re asking about isn’t currently implemented, “it could easily be a plugin!”
What Nanome 1.x wasn’t built for
Although we’ve made incredible strides in building Nanome, Nanome 1.x still has some fundamental limitations.
- Rapid prototyping led to Engineering Driven Design
- Generation 1 virtual reality headsets (Gen1 VR) optimized
- Not easily scalable beyond small molecule drug discovery
1. Engineering Driven Design
Since we were so focused on rapidly adding as many features as humanly possible, no matter how much time we would like to spend on user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI), the addition of new features forced us to squeeze functionality into disparate places. The side effect of this, as an example, many features that could have been 1 or 2 clicks currently take 3–5 clicks to use. Although we were willing to make this trade-off in the early days, we realize this isn’t the ideal UX to address a user’s workflow. The problem is not longer “do you have ____ feature?”, but instead “can I easily do ____ without clicking all over?”.
2. Generation 1 (Gen1) VR optimized Non-flexible Menu systems
When Nanome 1.0 launched, it was optimized for low resolution, PC tethered headsets like the original Oculus Rift CV1 and HTC Vive, which had a resolution of 1080 x 1200. Many of our prototypes were even developed for the DK2, which has an even smaller resolution at 960 x 1080. Lower resolution displays forced us to use menus that were big and far away, or as I like to refer to them as ‘billboard style menus’.
Additionally, since the launch of gen 1 VR headsets, new controller inputs such as hand tracking have also emerged. The optimization for gen 1 headsets, combined with how the menu system was optimized to easily add features instead of having the best experience accessing these features, became a challenge every time we wanted to evolve the menus. As headsets become higher resolution, input methods increase, and technologies like Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality mature, we want to have a much more flexible menu system that has seamless UX and is optimized for various use cases.
3. Not easily scalable beyond small molecule drug discovery
One of the challenging parts of being a startup is saying no to exciting opportunities. We had to stay disciplined about which user base to target that had the greatest impact VR could deliver in the early days. We realized that scientists in structure-based small molecule drug discovery were the best target user base for VR. Designing a small molecule drug is like designing a complex chemical key for a complex chemical lock (the protein target); These chemical locks, or Protein Binding Sites, are highly visual and structural in nature — the use of XR is perfect for this.
However, our mission at Nanome isn’t just to turbo boost scientists that are designing these small molecules, but also to help enable more scientific breakthroughs as a whole. We’re excited to tackle other molecular use cases like different therapeutic types (peptide, antibody, etc.), process/formulation chemistry, material/polymer science, and more. Nanome 1.x was hyper-focused on ensuring we maximize the value prop for small molecule drug discovery and was not designed to support other molecular science use cases. As our user base expands, we want to ensure we’re able to support these different use cases and enable more scientific breakthroughs.
Introducing what is to come next, Nanome 2.x
We’re excited to share with you what we have in mind for Nanome 2.x, the next generation of Nanome.
What we’re excited about with Nanome 2.x
- Design-driven engineering
- AR/MR support & flexible menu systems
- Scalability beyond small molecule drug discovery
We still plan to release updates and patches to 1.x, but for the most part, 2022 and 2023 will be focused on building out Nanome 2.0. We’ll have more to share as we make more progress on this ambitious tool of the future.
In the meantime, let us know what you think! Please send an email to support@nanome.ai or join the conversation on our user group slack channel! We’re excited to have you on this journey, and thank you for the continued support!
