LION: improving drug discovery

LION bioscience this week launched the latest version of its open integration platform, LION DiscoveryCenter 3.2, with an enhanced chemistry functionality for integrated drug discovery.

LION DiscoveryCenter 3.2 integrates chemical compound databases from cheminformatics provider MDL Information Systems as well as an in-house customer databases using MDL Relational Chemistry Server data cartridge to enable users to search and retrieve compound information.

Users can search multiple chemistry databases with a single query and display compound structures in a spreadsheet as well as create predefined compound summary sheets that aggregate all the relevant information about a particular compound.

"This latest release of LION DiscoveryCenter underscores LION's commitment to the continuous development and improvement of our integration platform, which is open to industry-leading technologies such as MDL's cheminformatics solutions and can be easily upgraded to suit the evolving needs of our customers,"​ said Dr Friedrich von Bohlen, chief executive officer of LION bioscience.

Combined with LION DiscoveryCenter biology functionality, based on LION's industry- leading SRS integration technology for biological data, the integrated chemistry functionality aims to help IT professionals to create comprehensive cross-disciplinary information systems. With the platform's combined access to chemistry and biology information and applications, researchers can identify compounds' relationships to previously unknown disease pathways and map them to a particular gene, protein or cluster of molecules.

"We are confident that this holistic approach to integrated drug discovery, which incorporates best-of-breed tools and technologies across disciplines, will improve discovery success rates and establish LION DiscoveryCenter as the industry standard for data and application integration,"​ added Dr von Bohlen.