A new program (or customer) kicks off

You're standing up something new: a new therapeutic area for an internal program, or a new client engagement at a CRO. Say it's antibody discovery against a panel of solid-tumor targets.

In Affinity, you open the Programs (or Customers, for CROs) page, and then register all related projects: campaigns pursuing the same disease area or therapeutic class for internal programs, or campaigns and studies being performed for the same customer. Once the program (or customer) exists, you add the projects that belong to it, one per molecule-level effort, each scoped to one or more targets. The work has structure from day one.

Scoping a project to its targets

You're launching an anti-CD20 antibody discovery project under the new oncology program.

On the project's page, add the targets the project pursues. A project isn't limited to one: scope it to a single antigen like CD20, or to several at once, such as CD20 and CD3 for a bispecific program or a panel of antigens for a broader effort. Every antibody developed against any of the project's targets links back to the project automatically. And a target's own page gathers everything being developed against it across the organization, so a target shared by more than one project shows up under each.

You map out the project's timeline

You've scoped the project to CD20. The next question is how the work flows: when target validation wraps, when hit identification begins, when lead optimization is expected to deliver candidates, when IND-enabling work starts.

Add phases to the project from its page. Each phase has a name, a start date, and an end date. As phases are added or edited, a live Gantt chart on the project updates immediately. Roll up across the projects in a program and the program-level Gantt shows every project's timeline on a single chart. The program's page becomes the working artifact for status reviews and planning meetings, with no separate project-management tool to keep in sync.

You define what a good candidate looks like

Hits are coming off the anti-CD20 campaign, and the question shifts from "what are we making?" to "which of these is good enough to advance?"

In Affinity, a project's requirements can be captured in a scoring profile, a weighted rubric built from the things that actually decide a biologic's fate: binding affinity from your SPR or BLI runs, developability liabilities flagged in the sequence, protein properties, and more. Each criterion carries a weight, a direction, and the goal value you're aiming for, so the profile encodes this project's definition of success rather than a generic score. Rank for diversity by V-gene family or epitope bin so the leaders aren't ten near-copies of one clone. Profiles are created right from the project's page, already scoped to it, and managed centrally, so a program can hold every project to one bar or let each set its own.

You build the project's dashboard

You want the project's standing visible at a glance, a live read on where the candidates stand against the goals you just set, not a status deck rebuilt every Friday.

Build a dashboard for the project and assemble it from the views that answer that question. A candidate-ranking view scoped to the project puts the strongest leads against the goals you set at the top, with a goal summary showing how the field is tracking; it isn't a list you hand-curate but a set defined dynamically on every candidate in scope, recomputed as the data underneath it changes. Set the project's phases beside it as a live Gantt, add throughput metrics or trends over time, and the schedule and the pipeline sit next to the science on one page. Bind that dashboard to the Home page and it becomes the team's landing view, the same picture for everyone who signs in.

Group work along your own lines

Your work is filed by program, project, and target, and most of the time that's exactly how you want to find it. But now and then you need it grouped a different way entirely, across all of those lines at once, because a set of items belongs together for a reason the structure doesn't hold.

The Tags page lists every tag your organization uses and what's tagged with it. A single tag can apply to programs, projects, targets, and candidates all at once, and filtering by it returns everything that carries it. Tags let you group work along lines your structure doesn't already draw, gathering related items from anywhere in the organization into one view without disturbing how they're organized everywhere else.

Why choose Affinity for planning

• Structure connected to data, not parallel to it. The org chart and the experimental data live in the same system, so the answer to "what's the status of this program?" is one query away.

• One platform, not five. Programs, projects, targets, and the data they accumulate share the same system. No status decks compiled by hand. No reconciliation between the planning tool and the lab tool.

• Set up once, not maintained weekly. Scope the structure once and the connections, the program Gantt, and the candidate rankings stay current on their own. The program's page is the status review, not a deck rebuilt for it every Friday.
  
  
• Start simple, add depth when you need it. A project scoped to a target is useful on day one; phases, scoring profiles, and dashboards are layers you add as a program matures, not a setup you finish first.
  
  

• Transparent pricing. $175 per user per month, every module included. Planning isn't an enterprise upsell.

• Founded in 2011, focused exclusively on biologics R&D. The programs/projects/targets structure was built for this industry's workflows, not retrofitted from a generic project management tool.