Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and Pharmacelera announce that they will collaborate in the field of drug discovery. In particular, the Ligand-based tool PharmScreen will be used in the context of research work performed at the Laboratory of Molecular Modelling and Drug Discovery, led by Professor Marco De Vivo at IIT. Furthermore, both teams will provide their expertise within the advanced techniques developed by both groups to achieve scientifically sound results.
“Pharmacelera has developed innovative and robust quantum mechanics tools that we want to couple to the most advanced Free Energy Perturbation methods. This may impact the efficiency of such powerful methods used to design new chemical compounds and drugs. Precisely, we are eager to explore the impact of their 3D molecular fields to the atomic mapping for designing new drugs”, Marco De Vivo comments.
“Cooperating with the Laboratory of “Molecular Modelling and Drug Discovery” at Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia, led by Professor Marco De Vivo, marks a prestigious milestone at Pharmacelera. We are convinced that by joining both IIT and Pharmacelera’s expertise, we will achieve relevant results that will revert both in an improvement of our methods and progress through IIT’s drug discovery programs”, Enric Gibert, CEO at Pharmacelera, remarks.
IIT is a non-profit Research Foundation based in Italy with the primary purpose to promote excellence in basic and applied scientific research. Through its research line “Molecular Modelling and Drug Discovery”, IIT has developed a deep knowledge and significant expertise in developing and using computational methods to understand, characterize, and design chemical systems with drug discovery and development applications.
Pharmacelera develops advanced computational tools for the discovery of novel hits using accurate Quantum-Mechanics (QM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). PharmScreen and PharmQSAR use 3D molecular descriptors derived from Quantum-Mechanics (QM) calculations to mine an unexplored chemical space and identify hits uncovered by traditional algorithms. Pharmacelera is offering a dual business development strategy: its technology can be accessed either via the license of its software packages or via ad-hoc services that their expert computational chemists might carry out.