Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and InhibOx Create New Powerhouse in Drug Discovery and Development Services.
New service supports big pharma's drive to outsourcing by offering highly sophisticated technologies for drug discovery with cloud computing and software-as-a-service facilities
Oxford and Cambridge, UK, 6th July 2010. InhibOx Ltd (Oxford, UK) and the
Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (Cambridge, UK) announce they that have
joined forces to create a uniquely powerful drug discovery service offering.
Users of the new service will benefit from the shared depth of expertise that
includes extensive commercial drug discovery experience and from the leading
proprietary technologies developed by the Oxford and Cambridge bodies.
The combined service offers pharmaceutical, biotech and governmental
research organizations access to new capabilities to accelerate drug discovery
and improve productivity. It includes full-spectrum computer-aided drug
discovery (CADD) from receptor site modeling, through lead identification, lead
optimization, and ADME property prediction to formulation modeling. The new
service offers life science companies a step-change in the quality and
effectiveness of CADD services through the use of leading proprietary
technologies and databases, applied by scientists with deep commercial drug
discovery experience.
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) is a not-for profit
organisation, established in 1965. It supports drug discovery through its
industry-standard Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), containing more than
half a million small molecule crystal structures, and through knowledge-based
tools to support receptor modeling, ligand design, docking, lead optimization
and formulation studies. Its database and modeling systems are in use at
research operations worldwide, including at all of the world's top
pharmaceutical companies.
InhibOx, the Oxford-based drug discovery service specialist, was founded in
2001 and has developed Scopius: the world's largest curated database of drug
candidate molecules. Scopius offers multiple-conformation 3D structures, shape
and charge descriptors, physical and ADME properties and commercial
availability information. It has also developed proprietary drug discovery
technologies to support target- and ligand-based lead identification, fragment-
based de novo design methods and formulation modeling. It is pioneering the use
of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service delivery methods to offer no-
compromise, on-demand lead identification and optimization services which have
demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional HTS and virtual
screening methods.
The two bodies have set up a joint team to commercialize and support the new
service and will share operating expenses and revenues. Sales and service
operations for the new, combined service are based out of Oxford and Cambridge,
UK and Princeton, NJ. The two organizations will also collaborate on the
development of new approaches to bring scientific breakthroughs and
productivity benefits to all aspects of computer-aided drug discovery,
delivering the greatest possible rigor to the process.
The driving force behind the alliance came from the CCDC's global and
evolving user community. "We have been asked more and more frequently by our
users whether we can bring to bear our in-house drug discovery experience to
address their research challenges" said Dr Colin Groom, Executive Director at
CCDC. "The alliance with InhibOx gives us the breadth of technology and a
focused team to meet this demand. We at CCDC are keen to do more work with our
users across the research community and this exciting development will take us
forward rapidly to be able to achieve this."
"The timing could not be better," explained Paul Davie, CEO of InhibOx. "The
drive to outsourcing by major pharmaceutical enterprises, and the resulting
emergence of a new wave of biotechs and CRO's, has created a sudden need for
high quality computer-aided drug discovery services. CADD cannot be delivered
effectively by companies with just point solutions or a few off-the-shelf tools.
This partnership gives the industry what it really needs - a full spectrum,
best of breed service offering, delivered by a team with real world drug design
and development experience in companies such as Pfizer, GSK, UCB, ICI, Dow and
several of the world's top academic institutions." The InhibOx-CCDC team is
offering a flexible scale of services, ranging from focused problem solution
provision through to complete drug discovery project assignments. More details
are available through the channels listed below.
The InhibOx-CCDC team is offering a flexible scale of services, ranging from
focused problem solution provision through to complete drug discovery project
assignments.
About The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
Originating in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge,
the CCDC is now a fully independent institution constituted as a non-profit
company and a registered charity since 1989. The CCDC is financially
independent, through annual subscriptions received for CSD System and industry
leading software such as GOLD and Relibase. . The CCDC has a strong track
record in basic research through more than 700 peer-reviewed publications;
these papers have attracted more than 18,000 citations in the international
scientific literature. More than 1,500 CSD applications papers by non-CCDC
authors have been similarly well received.
About inhibOx
InhibOx delivers novel and effective computational methods for drug
discovery to improve the productivity of lead and candidate identification and
optimization, through consultancy and software-as-a-service channels. The
company is a pioneer in the application of cloud computing to drive very large
scale computation at high accuracy, bringing for the first time no-compromise
computational drug discovery processes to bear in pharmaceutical and biotech
research. InhibOx 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 proprietary technology platform in computer-aided drug
design, funded by VCs, private investors, Oxford University and EU grants.
Ongoing activities comprise the development of entirely novel computational
drug discovery methods; building Scopius, the world's largest curated database
of 3D structures and properties, and their delivery to the life science
industries.
Contact details:
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
Web: www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk
Email: admin@ccdc.cam.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1223 336408
InhibOx
Web: www.inhibox.com
Email: contactus@inhibox.com
Phone: +44 1865 262000
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