InhibOx Ltd - Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and InhibOx create new powerhouse in drug discovery & development services
07 Jul 2010
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
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 organization, 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.
About 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:
http://www.inhibox.com/
Email: contactus@inhibox.com
Tel: +44 1865 262000
http://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/
Email: admin@ccdc.cam.ac.uk
Tel: +44 1223 336408
