The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), UK, and InhibOx Ltd., UK, have partnered to create a drug discovery service offering. Users of the new service are expected to benefit from the shared expertise that includes extensive commercial drug discovery experience and from the proprietary technologies developed by the Oxford and Cambridge bodies.
The combined service seeks to offer pharmaceutical, biotech and governmental research organisations 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 optimisation, and ADME property prediction to formulation modeling. The new service seeks to offer life science companies a step-change in the quality and effectiveness of CADD services through the use of proprietary technologies and databases, applied by scientists with commercial drug discovery experience.
CCDC is a not-for profit organisation that supports drug discovery through its industry-standard Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). The database contains over half a million small molecule crystal structures. It also offers knowledge-based tools to support receptor modeling, ligand design, docking, lead optimisation and formulation studies. Its database and modeling systems are claimed to be in use at research operations worldwide, including at all of the world's top pharmaceutical companies.
InhibOx, the Oxford-based drug discovery service specialist, has developed proprietary drug discovery technologies to support target- and ligand-based lead identification, fragment- based de novo design methods and formulation modeling. It is claimed to be pioneering the use of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service delivery methods to offer on-demand lead identification and optimisation services. These services have demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional HTS and virtual screening methods, according to the company.
The two bodies have set up a joint team to commercialise 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 organisations 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.
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