Tripos and United Devices Announce Partnership
ST. LOUIS, and AUSTIN, Texas – Sept. 9, 2003 – Tripos, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRPS), a leading provider of drug discovery informatics products and chemistry research, and United Devices Inc., the market leader in secure grid solutions, today announced plans to grid-enable Tripos’ virtual screening applications to operate on United Devices’ grid computing platform.
“This collaboration is a major step forward for the life sciences community,” said Amith Viswanath, industry manager, Healthcare and Life Sciences IT at Frost & Sullivan Ltd. “More and more companies are recognizing that end-user applications must become merged with a grid middleware backbone to drive the next generation of research. The main end result of such convergence is a significant increase in research scope, greater data access capabilities across the enterprise, and a reduction in overall workflow costs.”
Tripos combines information technology and scientific research to optimize and accelerate its customers’ molecular research for new drug discovery. Its customers include the majority of the world’s pharmaceutical companies.
“As a leading provider of discovery software products and services and chemistry research to the life science industries, we have spent the past two decades staying ahead of the technology curve to better serve our customers,” said Edward Hodgkin, vice president of marketing and business development at Tripos. “This alliance with United Devices is another way in which we are meeting industry needs.”
“It is exciting to couple the proven scientific benefits of Tripos’ software with the speed and scope of research attainable on a grid platform,” said Paul Kirchoff, vice president of marketing and business development at United Devices. “Both companies are eager to respond to this growing customer need.”
They will work together to port FlexX™, FlexX-Pharm™ and FlexE™, programs that allow virtual screening of compound databases by rapidly docking flexible ligands at active sites, and Unity® 3D software that provides fast, conformationally flexible 3-D searching of chemical databases to United Devices’ Grid MP™ platform. This collaboration will offer scientists even more applications to run on their enterprise or on-demand grids.
United Devices’ Grid MP™ Enterprise platform is currently being used by companies such as Novartis and Sanofi-Synthelabo Inc. to accelerate and define drug discovery, as well as by researchers at the Purdue University and the University of Texas to harness the latent power of existing compute resources.
Both Tripos and United Devices are exhibiting at the American Chemical Society’s 226th National Meeting, being held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City Sept. 8-10.
About Tripos, Inc.
Tripos (Nasdaq: TRPS) combines leading-edge technology and innovative science to deliver consistently superior chemistry-research products and services for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and other life science industries. Tripos partners with clients to accelerate and improve the creation of life-enhancing products. Within Tripos’ Discovery Informatics (DI) business, the company provides software products and consulting services to develop, manage, analyze and share critical drug discovery information. Within Tripos’ Discovery Research (DR) business, Tripos’ medicinal chemists and research scientists partner directly with clients in their research initiatives, leveraging state-of-the-art information technologies and research facilities. Headquartered in St. Louis, Mo., Tripos spans the world with global research operations and an international client base. Further information on Tripos can be found at http://www.tripos.com/.
About United Devices
United Devices is the market leader in secure grid solutions. The company’s Grid MP platform is used to aggregate compute resources on a network to create an enterprise grid capable of running a wide range of high-performance computing applications in life sciences, geosciences, manufacturing, financial services, chemical engineering and other industries. The company’s solutions are available in both enterprise and on-demand deployments. United Devices also operates the world’s largest Grid for grand-scale research that consists of more than 2 million devices in over 220 countries. For more information on secure grid solutions, visit the United Devices Web site http://www.ud.com/. To volunteer your idle compute power, visit http://www.grid.org/.
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