New In Silico Drug Discovery Platform

Optibrium™, a provider of software solutions for drug discovery, provided a preview of the next generation of StarDrop™ at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco, CA, in February. StarDrop 5 includes new features focusing on compound idea generation, enhanced visualisations and mathematical data transformations.

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™ visualisations, to improve the efficiency and productivity of the drug discovery process.

StarDrop 5 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