Optibrium to preview new in silico drug discovery platform

Optibrium, a provider of software solutions for drug discovery, will be providing a sneak preview of the next generation of StarDrop at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco, CA, 23-25 February, 2011.

StarDrop 5 - Trellis, chemical space and radar plots

The exclusive preview of this ground-breaking platform will be available on booth #501, at San Francisco’s Moscone North Convention Centre prior to its official launch at the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Exposition, 27-31 March, 2011, Anaheim, CA.

StarDrop 5 includes new features focusing on compound idea generation, enhanced visualizations and mathematical data transformations. To schedule a booth meeting with Optibrium and learn more about the new features of enhanced StarDrop 5 please email [email protected] or visit: www.optibrium.com/stardrop5.

Quickly identifying the best potential drug molecules is a major challenge; the right balance of multiple, often conflicting, property requirements must be achieved, while the uncertainty in the available data makes effective decision-making difficult. Good compounds are often thrown out in error, or missed by not searching widely enough, meaning wasted productivity, higher costs and reduced opportunity to discover new drugs.

StarDrop is a revolutionary software platform that supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies to guide their decisions while designing and prioritising molecules for progression in drug discovery. It integrates all of the available data and explicitly takes into account the underlying uncertainty to provide scientists with intuitive analyses on which to make rational decisions. It has an advantage over traditional decision support and modelling platforms, as it quickly targets compounds in the regions of chemical space that are most likely to yield successful results. Its interactive, user friendly environment brings together a comprehensive range of drug design features including ADME QSAR models, P450 metabolism models and automatic predictive model building, along with StarDrop’s unique probabilistic scoring, chemical space and Glowing Molecule visualizations, to improve the efficiency and productivity of the drug discovery process.

StarDrop 5, scheduled for release at ACS 2011, is a major upgrade bringing many significant enhancements and new features to further expand its capabilities. An innovative new module stimulates the search for high quality drugs by generating new chemistry ideas, prioritised against the user’s property profile requirements. This expands the chemistry around an initial compound, based on medicinal chemistry transformation rules derived from the literature or in-house chemistry expertise, to generate chemically relevant compounds and fuel a rigorous search for strategies to improve properties. In addition, extended data visualisation capabilities allow automatic generation of a wide range of interactive histograms, graphs, radar plots and chemical spaces. Combined with new functionality for performing mathematical calculations, StarDrop will help users to manipulate and explore their data without leaving the integrated StarDrop environment.

“We are extremely excited to preview StarDrop 5 during Mol Med Tri-Con 2011”, commented Ed Champness, CSO at Optibrium. “In addition to the previous generations’ features, which have been very well received by our rapidly expanding customer base, version 5 is equipped with powerful new data analysis tools and a revolutionary new capability to push drug discovery further and enable scientists to guide decisions in an intuitive way.”

The only exclusive preview of StarDrop 5, prior to the official release date, will be at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco, CA, 23-25 February, 2011 on booth #501. To learn more about StarDrop 5 please visit: www.optibrium.com/stardrop5. Alternatively email [email protected] or call +44 1223 815 900.