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New service supports big pharma’s drive to outsourcing by offering highly sophisticated technologies for drug discovery chemistry with leading computer-aided drug design services. InhibOx Ltd and the COSMIC Discoveries (the independent service arm of the Institute of Life Sciences, Hyderabad, India) announce that they have formed a close strategic partnership to deliver a full service drug discovery service offering, incorporating expert computational, medicinal and synthetic chemistry design capabilities. Both commercial organizations, linked to world-leading academic institutes, have built their services on advanced proprietary science and technology. Together, they offer unique capabilities that are able to address the most demanding drug discovery challenges on behalf of biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide.
Computational chemistry service organizations tend to operate in isolation, leaving their customers to handle compound acquisition or synthesis. Similarly, medicinal chemistry providers often use standard, off-the-shelf molecular modeling systems and databases, with only a small team of specialist users – they therefore lack access to advanced, proprietary systems and breadth of expertise. This partnership meets the market need to bring to the customer a single point of business contact and ownership and to deliver joined-up leading-edge design services.
InhibOx, the computational drug discovery specialist, is pioneering the use of cloud computing to offer rigorous, full-spectrum computer-aided drug discovery capabilities to customers around the world. COSMIC Discoveries’ diverse medicinal and synthetic chemistry expertise spans major therapeutic areas and numerous disease-relevant targets and mechanisms. Their medicinal and computational chemists have developed multiple pre-clinical drug candidates from early leads and hits in a wide variety of therapeutic areas.
“InhibOx is extremely proud to enter into partnership with such a prestigious research establishment, led by Professor Iqbal. Their medicinal and synthetic chemistry insights give InhibOx the scope not only to design lead libraries but to deliver samples built from innovative, well-validated chemistries,” said Professor Graham Richards, chairman & founder of InhibOx and former chairman of chemistry at Oxford University. “This is exciting because it effectively broadens the accessible chemistry space for our customers to include the 110 million compounds in our Scopius platform – the world’s largest available curated drug candidate database. This is truly innovative, integrated design and build services at scale.”
Professor Javed Iqbal, president & founder of COSMIC Discoveries and former distinguished research scientist and global head, discovery chemistry at Dr Reddy’s laboratory, explained, “This strategic partnership allows COSMIC Discoveries to offer design and build services based on a far more diverse set of starting propositions, derived from an innovative and wider chemistry space, tuned to our unique synthetic and medicinal chemistry capabilities. The access this partnership gives us to InhibOx’s powerful and unique in silico design capabilities sets COSMIC Discoveries apart from standard chemistry suppliers”.
The two organizations, in addition to offering integrated drug discovery services, will collaborate on the design of new candidate molecules in support of an internal research projects at Cosmic Discoveries.
About InhibOx
InhibOx delivers novel and effective computational methods for drug discovery to improve the productivity of lead and candidate identification and optimization. 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 truly rigorous computational drug discovery processes to bear in pharmaceutical and biotech research. InhibOx was founded in 2001 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. It has invested heavily over almost ten years to build Scopius: the world’s largest curated screening database of drug candidate molecules, containing 110 million multiple-conformation 3D structures, shape and charge descriptors, physical properties and commercial availability information. It has also developed proprietary fast molecular comparison technologies in receptor- and ligand-based virtual screening, fragment-based design methods and formulation modeling to drive lead identification and optimization studies in projects for customers in the USA and Europe. It is pioneering the use of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service delivery methods to offer full-spectrum computer-aided drug discovery capabilities which have demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional HTS and virtual screening methods.
About COSMIC Discoveries
COSMIC Discoveries is an independent service vertical of Institute of Life Sciences, and provides technical and innovative support to significantly enhance the medicinal chemistry efforts of global pharma, biotechs, research institutes and academic research centers. COSMIC Discoveries was founded by Prof. Javed Iqbal, who is also the director of Institute of Life Sciences, and derives its scientific core from the strong research base in Institute of Life Sciences. At COSMIC Discoveries, the diverse medicinal and synthetic chemistry expertise spans major therapeutic areas and numerous disease-relevant targets, i.e. therapeutic targets like PPAR (diabetes), AMP Kinase (diabetes), MAP and Aurora kinases (cancer), JNK (diabetes, inflammation), CB1 (obesity), lipoic acid syntheses (diabetes, obesity) and CETP (cardiovascular). Several decades of experience of the drug discovery process mostly gained within pharma & biotechs, including all aspects of medicinal chemistry from screen / HTS set-up to collaboration with development functions, along with COSMIC’s ever expanding well-knit worldwide network capabilities make it the best destination for outsourcing services in chemistry. It is COSMIC’s vision to be a globally recognized and preferred partner in providing cutting-edge services in organic, medicinal & innovative chemistry.
