Optive Research Demonstrates Leadership in Providing Discovery Software for Bench Chemists
Optive Research Inc. today demonstrated its growing leadership in the market for drug discovery software designed for bench chemists by announcing significant customer wins and deployments of the Company’s Benchware(tm) software at leading pharmaceutical companies, including Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Structural GenomiX, Schering AG Group and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG.
The use of computer-assisted drug discovery software by computational chemists has been mainstream practice in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agrochemical industries for many years. However, with increasing pressure to reduce discovery costs and time-to-market, a growing number of companies are looking for innovative ways to gain further competitive advantage by empowering medicinal or “bench” chemists and other scientists with tools to perform routine analyses leading to better decisions about what compounds to synthesize and test.
“Optive’s Benchware is a valuable complement to our investments in other computer-assisted drug discovery software,” said Dr. Michael Foley, vice president of chemistry for Infinity Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass. “Our med chemists now have the autonomy to enumerate and design libraries for our lead follow-up programs right on their laptops, while our comp chemists have more time to focus on more in-depth data mining and docking analyses.”
Benchware products provide a carefully selected subset of the well-established scientific algorithms used by computational chemists in Optive’s IRIX and Linux-based Discovery Engines. However, Benchware products present that functionality in programs offering the look and feel of familiar Microsoft Office applications and, thereby, provide the ease of use which busy bench scientists demand. The Company’s recently announced collaboration with Microsoft Corporation will lead to an enhanced version of Benchware based on the .NET Framework, scheduled for release later this year.
“Benchware is helping our medicinal chemists design very high-quality parallel libraries of compounds for our kinase lead discovery programs,” said Dr. Normand Hebert, director of parallel synthesis at Structural GenomiX in San Diego, Calif. “By leveraging the information provided by our computational scientists, LibraryMaker and LibraryDesigner not only enable greater return on our investment in computational chemistry but also help our chemists make more informed decisions about which compounds to synthesize and pursue in drug development.”
Optive’s recent customers for Benchware include:
Infinity Pharmaceuticals (www.ipi.com), Cambridge, Mass.
Structural GenomiX (www.stromix.com), San Diego, Calif.
Schering AG (www.schering.de), Berlin, Germany
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG (www.boehringer-ingelheim.de), Biberach an der Riss, Germany
WuXi PharmaTech (www.pharmatechs.com), Shanghai, China
Products in the Benchware suite currently include: LibraryMaker(tm), for parallel and combinatorial library enumeration; LibraryDesigner(tm), for product-based library design; and LibraryExplorer(tm), for chemistry-space and data visualization. Other Benchware applications, including solutions for helping chemists generate ideas for lead exploration or scaffold hopping, are scheduled for release later this year.
Optive Research was formed in 2002 by respected scientist professor Robert S. Pearlman, who 25 years ago founded the Laboratory for the Development of Computer-Assisted Drug Discovery Software at the University of Texas at Austin. Optive’s software is now in use at nearly every major pharmaceutical research facility in the world.
About Optive Research Inc.
Optive Research Inc. develops, markets and supports scientific software solutions that help companies engaged in molecular discovery research bring beneficial chemical compounds to market faster, while reducing overall cost. Optive’s novel software is designed to be used by both computational chemists and experimental, “wet-lab” scientists, enabling them to reduce discovery cycle times and synthesize higher quality lead compounds, thereby achieving more predictable discovery processes. Software developed by Optive Research is currently in use at nearly every major pharmaceutical company and at hundreds of other research sites worldwide. More information about Optive Research is available at www.optive.com
Contact:
Optive Research Inc., Austin
Tad Druart, 512-497-9880
mediarelations@optive.com
