Sygnature Discovery Adopts OpenEye Scientific’s Orion™ Platform to Strengthen Molecular Design Services

January 21, 2021 |

4 min read

OpenEye Scientific and Sygnature Discovery – a world-leading integrated discovery and pre-clinical solutions provider – today announced the adoption of OpenEye’s Orion™ platform to power Sygnature’s computational efforts in molecular design drug discovery solutions.

SANTA FE, N.M. and NOTTINGHAM, England, Jan. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenEye Scientific and Sygnature Discovery – a world-leading integrated discovery and pre-clinical solutions provider – today announced the adoption of OpenEye’s Orion™ platform to power Sygnature’s computational efforts in molecular design drug discovery solutions.

On behalf of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies globally, all of Sygnature Discovery’s Computer-Aided Drug Design team will benefit from the Orion platform’s large-scale capabilities: virtual high-throughput screening of billions of molecules, molecular dynamics simulations including binding free energy calculations, and quantum mechanics calculations.

In using Orion, scientists at Sygnature now can easily leverage the power of hundreds of thousands of CPUs at Amazon Web Services, which will have a dramatic impact on both the quality and diversity of the hits generated for their customers’ projects, while accelerating those projects’ timelines and reducing project costs.

“Our mission at Sygnature is quite simple: to enable success for our customers through world class science, and to help bring life-changing therapeutics through the challenging drug discovery process in order to help patients get the best medicines possible,” said Dr. Simon Hirst, CEO and Founder of Sygnature Discovery. “That means employing the best technologies available to support our scientists in that quest, and we are very excited to see how the Orion platform will power more efficiency and new breakthroughs in our projects.”

Sygnature’s use of the Orion platform provides cloud-based molecular and data visualization and analytics as well as facile access to the latest scientific methods, making it possible for Sygnature to unify and operate modeling tasks for the first time without leaving the cloud.

“Sygnature Discovery is using Orion exactly as we conceived: as a molecular design ecosystem of data visualization, communication and workflow tools in a robust, scalable cloud environment,” said Dr. Anthony Nicholls, CEO of OpenEye Scientific. “It is really gratifying to see Sygnature helping its clients identify more hits and optimize more leads using Orion’s industry-leading technology infrastructure and scientific methods.”

About Sygnature Discovery
Sygnature Discovery is a leading independent integrated drug discovery and pre-clinical services company. Private equity-backed since 2017, the company operates fully enabled research facilities in Nottingham and Alderley Park, UK, housing more than 375 research scientists (over 80% of whom hold a PhD) and has an office presence in Cambridge, Mass., USA. Their experienced drug-hunters possess all the professional skills and know-how required to undertake the most demanding of research programmes, and drive them from target validation through hit identification, hit-to-lead and lead optimisation to pre-clinical development candidate. Sygnature’s pharmacology arm was formed by the incorporation of RenaSci, acquired in 2018, into Sygnature’s fully-integrated drug discovery platform. Since 2011, 34 compounds discovered by Sygnature for clients have entered pre-clinical development and, so far, 17 of these have progressed to clinical trials (Phases I, II and III). In 2017, Sygnature Discovery received the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade. For further information, visit www.sygnaturediscovery.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. Our scientific, physics-based approach to molecular design historically focused on molecular shape and electrostatic potential to inform and guide molecular discovery and optimization. OpenEye now has 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 the advancement of pharmaceuticals, biologics, agrochemicals, and flavors and fragrances. 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.openeye.inc.

Contacts:
Marshall Poindexter
OpenEye Scientific
+1.617.849.8670
marketing@eyesopen.com

Andy Lindstrom
Sygnature Discovery
+44.115.941.5401
comms@sygnaturediscovery.com