OpenEye Scientific and Beacon Discovery today announced the rapid identification of two novel chemical entities and more than 30 potent hits for known G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) targets using Gigadock™ functionality in OpenEye’s Orion™ molecular design cloud platform.
SANTA FE, N.M. & SAN DIEGO, Calif. – OpenEye Scientific and Beacon Discovery today announced the rapid identification of two novel chemical entities and more than 30 potent hits for known G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) targets using Gigadock™ functionality in OpenEye’s Orion™ molecular design cloud platform.
To quickly identify novel active compounds for known GPCR targets in Orion, the Beacon Discovery team used structure-based virtual screening through OpenEye’s Gigadock functionality—which performs massively parallel molecular docking through tens of thousands of CPUs at Amazon Web Service—and ligand-based virtual screening through FastROCS to rapidly screen the Enamine REAL collection of 2.5Bn commercially available molecules.
“OpenEye’s novel technology seamlessly implemented on the Amazon cloud has been a game-changer for our computational approaches to drug discovery,” said Sunny Al-Shamma, CEO of Beacon Discovery. “We have leveraged these tools to make significant progress on multiple targets.”
OpenEye’s industry-leading Orion molecular design platform enables Beacon Discovery, other pharmaceutical and biotechnology, agrochemical, and flavor and fragrance companies, as well as academic, government, non-profit, and other organizations to sift through billions of molecules using 2D ligand similarity in seconds, 3D ligand similarity in minutes or Gigadock functionality in hours.
“We are excited that Orion’s Gigadock facility was able to help Beacon Discovery find great leads worthy of follow-up,” said Dr. Anthony Nicholls, CEO of OpenEye Scientific. “We built our cloud platform to help rapidly advance small molecule discovery, and to see Beacon’s success is sensational. Orion levels the discovery playing field for small- and medium-sized biotechnology companies, providing resources previously only available to the largest of pharmaceutical companies.”
About Beacon Discovery
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Diego, Beacon Discovery is a world leader in GPCR-focused drug discovery. Beacon’s mission is to efficiently identify and advance molecules targeting GPCRs from concept to clinic. Beacon’s internal pipeline focuses on GPCRs for which the native ligand remains unknown. These orphan GPCRs provide unexploited opportunities to develop novel drugs addressing significant unmet medical need. In addition, Beacon collaborates with biopharma partners to leverage internally enabled GPCR targets and small molecule modulators as well as its wealth of GPCR discovery skills and tools.
For more information, please contact: Sunny Al-Shamma, CEO, haa@beacondiscovery.com
About OpenEye Scientific
OpenEye Scientific is an industry leader in computational molecular design based on decades of delivering rapid, robust, and scalable software, toolkits, and technology and design services across the drug discovery process. Our scientific approach has focused on visualizing and analyzing the shape and electrostatics of molecular 3D structures to inform and guide the advancement of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. OpenEye recently integrated its applications and toolkits into Orion, the only cloud-native, fully integrated molecular design platform. Combining unlimited computation and storage with powerful tools for data sharing, visualization and analysis in an open development platform, Orion offers unprecedented capabilities for drug discovery and optimization. Founded in 1997, OpenEye is a privately held company headquartered in Santa Fe, N.M., with offices in Boston, Mass.; Cologne, Germany; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, go to www.eyesopen.com.
