Intelligensys and InhibOx Apply Proven Formulation Approaches to Improve Lead Discovery Efficiency
Oxford and Stokesley, UK — 8th February 2010
InhibOx Ltd (Oxford, UK) and Intelligensys Ltd (Stokesley, North Yorkshire, UK) announce a partnership to apply advanced machine learning approaches, already successful in formulation design, to improve virtual screening and computer-aided drug design (CADD) efficiency.
The collaboration will build on InhibOx’s six-year investment in developing Scopius, its 35-million entry library of available and readily-synthesised compounds with associated fine-grained shape and charge descriptors. The team will apply Intelligensys’s sophisticated rule-based approaches—already proven in successful formulation studies for companies worldwide—alongside InhibOx’s powerful shape and property matching algorithms, to deliver new capabilities in ligand-based lead discovery.
The new partnership will also develop and incorporate into the Scopius database drug development criteria, such as accurately estimated LogP, solubility and other ADME properties. Bringing these into the early lead discovery stage will reduce attrition in downstream pre-clinical studies and return significant cost savings to drug discovery operations. This is directly aligned with the developing strategy of modern drug discovery.
The marriage of simulation and artificial intelligence that this collaboration represents will deliver breakthroughs that will take virtual screening to new levels of predictive power.
Dr Paul Finn, CEO of InhibOx, commenting on the collaboration stated, “This project takes us far beyond the industry’s standard approaches to virtual screening, based on simple structural models. Through this work we are further enhancing virtual screening’s ability to deliver real benefits in industrial drug design.
“InhibOx has always been at the forefront in bringing in novel approaches from outside the traditional computational chemistry paradigms and exploiting their potential. The collaboration with Intelligensys, world-leaders in their own domain, bears this out. We are delighted to be working with them and believe the benefits to drug discovery will be enormous”.
Dr Elizabeth Colbourn, Scientific Director of Intelligensys, added, “We have seen, over many years, too many seemingly promising lead compounds fail to make it through preclinical tests. This has been expensive to the industry and is largely avoidable. This collaboration is delivering the capability to stem these losses and delivery much more cost-effective drug discovery as a result. We are all extremely excited about this breakthrough”.
About InhibOx
InhibOx, a leader in drug lead identification and library design software and service, uses breakthrough proprietary technology to offer an on-demand virtual screening capability which has demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional high throughput screening methods.
InhibOx develops novel and effective computational methods for drug discovery to improve the productivity of lead and candidate identification. The company was founded by Professor W. Graham Richards, former Chairman of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and world-leading computational chemist. The company grew from the outstandingly successful Screensaver Lifesaver project which involved some 3.5 million personal computers in over 200 countries: the world's biggest computational chemistry experiment finding lead compounds to inhibit cancer targets, anthrax and smallpox. Since then, InhibOx has built up a significant technology platform in computer-aided drug design. Ongoing activities comprise the development of entirely novel computational drug discovery methods; the development of Scopius, a very large and carefully curated database of commercially-available and virtual chemical structures and their delivery to the life science industries.
Contact Details: www.inhibox.com,
Email: contactus "at" inhibox.com
About Intelligensys
Intelligensys enables companies involved in product formulation and process development to realize business potential, by providing software that unlocks the value in their existing experimental data.
Intelligensys was founded in 1999, building on activities pioneered within ICI PLC, Zeneca PLC, and Oxford Materials Ltd.
Feedback from the PROFITS (PROduct Formulation using InTelligent Software) special interest group at the University of Bradford showed that a vehicle was needed to deliver new technologies to formulation-based industry. In recognition of this need, Intelligensys was founded to focus on the use of new technologies, especially in artificial intelligence, for product formulation. Since that time, Intelligensys have grown to encompass selected areas of simulation so as to cover all three areas—data, rules, and theory—in specific industrial domains. Intelligensys solutions have been provided to Pharma, Chemical, Coatings and Academic sectors. It has a worldwide customer base.
Contact Details: www.intelligensys.co.uk,
Email: postmaster "at" intelligensys.co.uk