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CRESSET
BIOMOLECULAR DISCOVERY LAUNCH A NOVEL IN SILICO LEAD-FINDING TECHNOLOGY FOR
MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY
Hertfordshire, UK, 9 December 2004 – Cresset BioMolecular Discovery Ltd
(Cresset BMD), a drug discovery technology company has announced today the
launch of FieldScreen™, its novel proprietary lead-finding and series-switching
technology which can accelerate the selection of leads for targets based on
molecular fields rather than traditional molecular structure.
FieldScreen™ is a powerful tool that allows users to search through in-house and
commercially available compound libraries to select arrays of compounds with
diverse structures but the same biological function. This can be a laborious
process for companies in early stage drug development, but FieldScreen™ can
accomplish the task in a fraction of the time. What makes FieldScreen™ unique is
that this hit selection is accomplished by an analysis of the molecular field
around the compound and not the molecular structure itself.
Cresset’s Founder and CSO, Dr Andy Vinter, commented:
“Cresset's Field technology redefines the way medicinal chemists look at
molecular structures. Already we have had a lot of interest and three major
pharmaceutical companies are evaluating the software.”
Cresset’s field technology defines why two structurally different drug molecules
can have the same therapeutic effect. If these two compounds bind to the same
region of a protein, their ‘outer skins' must be similar despite their
structural differences. This is not a new observation but, until now, it has
been impossible to characterise the ‘skin’ precisely in a workable application.
Cresset has solved this problem by creating accurate fields around a molecule
(the ‘skin’) by improving the underlying science behind their generation.
Cresset’s FieldScreen™ is the first validated field analysis software
application for candidate selection. The software has already demonstrated its
ability to find completely novel hits from screening just a few hundred
compounds rather than hundreds of thousands. Successful collaborations have
replaced peptides with non-peptide and steroid with non-steroid leads, as well
as finding novel leads starting from known ‘drug-like’ molecules
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NOTES FOR EDITORS
1. About Cresset BioMolecular Discovery Ltd – www.cresset-bmd.com
Cresset BioMolecular Discovery Ltd. is a drug discovery technology company based
in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Founded in November 2001, the Company has
pioneered the use of in silico applications for the analysis of molecular fields
rather than structures in candidate selection for drug discovery. Cresset
undertakes fee-for-service projects and collaborations with shared IP and
includes six Big Pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca, Novartis and
GlaxoSmithKline and ten biotechnology companies among its customers. The Company
also markets its proprietary Fieldscreen™ software, a candidate selection
technology that rapidly identifies diverse drug like compounds with the same
biological effects.
2. About FieldScreen™
FieldScreen™ is a software application that accomplishes rapid candidate
selection based on molecular fields derived from the underlying proprietary
molecular mechanics force field, XED, of druglike compounds. This approach was
originally developed to improve the handling of pi-pi stacking in aromatic
systems and has been used and validated for the prediction of biological
function in druglike compounds for over ten years. FieldScreen™ is the first
effective software application that can rapidly analyse libraries of diverse
drug-like compounds to select those with similar biological function. The
technology works by analysing and displaying the electrostatic, steric and
hydrophobic fields around molecules and identifying key binding regions. This
can then be used to hypothesise the bound conformation of a ligand in the
absence of an X-ray structure. The method has been widely validated against GPCR
targets where the lack of an X-ray structure of the target severely limits the
computational methods (e.g. docking) that can be used effectively to find new
hits. It is worth noting that over 40% of current drug targets are GPCRs. Two
patents have been filed to protect the FieldScreen™ technology.
Further enquiries:
Northbank Communications Ltd
Dr Douglas Pretsell or Sue Charles
Tel: +44 (0)20 7886 8150
d.pretsell@northbankcommunications.com
s.charles@northbankcommunications.com
Cresset BioMolecular Discovery Ltd
Dr Sally Rose
Tel: 01462 476 320
s.rose@cresset-bmd.com
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