The ELN Built for
Chemistry Labs

They work fine for day-to-day drawing — but they cannot answer the questions an FDA inspector, patent attorney, or auditor will ask. "Show me the complete history of every edit to this structure. Who edited it? When? Which version was used in this submission?" CERF answers those questions instantly. And CERF works with ChemDraw, MarvinSketch, and your other chemistry tools through round-trip integration — your chemists continue using their preferred editors while CERF provides the compliant data management layer underneath.

The bundled MarvinView™ and MarvinSketch™ viewer/editor functionality is included with every CERF install — no extra license required for inline structure display. A current Certara (formerly ChemAxon) license is required to activate the structure search functionality (substructure, similarity, and full structure search). Lab-Ally can provide these licenses at a significant discount for CERF customers — ask your account manager. JMol is also available as an alternative inline viewer with no separate license.

If your chemistry data will be included in any regulatory submission — an IND, NDA, ANDA, or CMC package — the underlying records need to meet 21 CFR Part 11. Even if you're not currently regulated, building your chemistry data management on a compliant foundation protects you when your research moves toward commercialization or licensing. Rebuilding your data infrastructure mid-program is far more expensive than getting it right from the start — and re-creating defensible records retroactively for IP filings is often not possible at all.

CERF scales comfortably to organizational compound registries of tens of thousands of structures. Structures are indexed on ingest for substructure and similarity search, embedded properties are extracted into searchable database fields, and large files can be stored on external network storage via CERF's network file link architecture without duplication. Lab-Ally can pre-load your server with an open-source CML reference library of 500+ structures with pre-populated metadata as a starting point.

No. The CERF philosophy is to wrap your existing chemistry tools — not replace them. Chemists continue using ChemDraw, MarvinSketch, or whatever editors they prefer. CERF's role is to provide the compliant notebook, version control, search, signature, and audit layer around those tools. Most chemistry teams are productive in CERF within a few hours of training.

CERF can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or on a sealed LAN — whichever fits your environment. Lab-Ally provides IQ/OQ qualification support as part of implementation. Most teams are operational within days. CERF is extremely affordable, with prices typically in the region of $100–400 per user per year — and our perpetual licensing option means your costs can be known up-front instead of growing with every renewal cycle.

The labs that benefit most from CERF are often small academic and biotech groups that need defensible IP records (for patent filings, papers, or licensing) without a full data management department. CERF scales down very affordably, and the perpetual licensing option lets a small team own its data infrastructure forever. The investment usually pays for itself the first time you need to defend a publication date or a patent priority claim.

CERF natively displays and indexes more than 24 chemistry file types: CDX/CDXML (ChemDraw), MOL/MOL2, SDF, SD, RXN, RDF, CML, PDB, MRV, XYZ, SMILES/SMI, SMARTS, SMIRKS, CXSMILES, CXSMARTS, InChI, SYB/SYBYL, CSMOL, CSD, CSRDF, CSRXN, and others. If a chemistry format you use is not on this list, you can still store it in CERF and edit it via round-trip checkout to your preferred external application.