InhibOx and the National Foundation for Cancer Research announce the launch of DrugFinder, a free hit identification service


InhibOx Limited
Pembroke House
36-37 Pembroke Street
Oxford OX1 1BP
UK

www.inhibox.com

Oxford, UK – 19th September 2008 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

InhibOx Limited announces the launch of a free hit identification service. It will enable research groups in academia and biotechnology companies to exploit an increasingly important starting point for novel drug discovery, namely, crystal structures of target proteins with an inhibitor bound in the active site.

The project follows on from the extremely successful screensaver project run from the University of Oxford Chemistry Department (http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk) by Professor Graham Richards in collaboration with computational chemistry company InhibOx and the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR), with sponsorship at various times from Intel Corporation, Microsoft and IBM. The screensaver project which ran from 2001-2007 (http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer) involved over 3.5 million personal computers in more than 200 countries and was the world’s biggest computational chemistry experiment. A database of some three billion molecules was screened and a number of predicted hits were subsequently synthesized and tested with very promising results. Virtual screening clearly works.

The NFCR and Inhibox have joined forces again to offer a service using InhibOx’s in-house computing facilities and databases of molecular structures. By going to a web site www.inhibox.com/drugfinder, researchers in universities or biotechnology companies will be able to submit a structure with a bound inhibitor. Inhibox will screen its small molecule database against the target and then provide to the academic or biotechnology company potentially superior inhibitors. Any intellectual property will be treated confidentially and results will belong to the group providing the crystal structure.

The screening service will be provided through three service levels: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The Bronze service will be entirely free of charge and will identify up to 100 compounds from the database which are similar to the bound inhibitor, but offer the possibility of new scaffolds and chemistry.

The Silver service mirrors the Bronze, but includes searching a larger database and will return a larger number (up to 1000) of novel potential inhibitors. The fee for the Silver Service will be $10,000. The Gold service, which is likely to follow from the successful

At least one member in this whole community this is being appreciated

And as a site adminitrator told me, some good is coming of all your work

Thanks again Harold !

Thanks once again Harold