Griffith University’s Eskitis Institute is celebrating 10 years of research success in 2013 with the creation of an interactive digital report in the form of a mobile App.
Apps are all the rage these days and in this instance provide an ideal method for the Eskitis Institute to publish a visually dynamic summary of highlights from the past 10 years in drug discovery for staff, stakeholders and visitors.
Director of the Eskitis Institute, Professor Ron Quinn AM, a cycling enthusiast, said the inspiration for the look and feel of the App came from his favourable experiences in following the Tour de France using a mobile app in 2012.
“We’re very pleased to be able to showcase the research achievements of Eskitis using this up-to-date medium, Professor Quinn said.
“We’ve never put out a public annual report before, and we wanted our first one to be something a bit special.”
The App has been developed by digital designers at Griffith University and includes images, researcher profiles, interactive timelines and video interviews with the Institutes researchers.
The goal of the App design is to inform people about the work of the Institute to find new drugs that will fight cancer, infectious diseases, neurological diseases and promote global health.
The pages within the App include key publications, highlights from the past 10 years, a message from the Director, Professor Ronald J Quinn AM, plus descriptions of core resources such as the Nature Bank resource, a storehouse of chemical diversity from the natural world.
For the uninitiated, Nature Bank is an integrated drug discovery platform encompassing a library of over 200,000 optimised natural product fractions derived from a diverse collection of over 45,000 samples of plants and marine invertebrates, including thousands of samples collected with the Queensland Museum.
The Eskitis Institute is also home to the Queensland Compound Library, an automated library of nearly 400,000 pure compounds from Australian chemists.
Phase one of the development was the creation of an App for the iPad, which is currently available from the iTunes App Store.
Phase two is the development of the mobile App for Android tablets. Which will be available from the Google Play Store.