Sygnature taps SilcsBio for drug design software
Sygnature Discovery, which provides drug discovery and preclinical services, is collaborating with the scientific software company SilcsBio. Headquartered Baltimore, MD, SilcsBio focuses on high-throughput fully atomistic simulations of protein targets and protein-ligand structures.
Under terms of the collaborating, SilcsBio is providing Sygnature with access to its SILCS (Site dentification by Ligand Competitive Saturation) and SSFEP (Single Step Free Energy Perturbation) software.
Bill Tatsis, computational chemist at Sygnature Discovery, said the collaboration enables the company to use the tools for energy calculations in hit-to-lead (H2L) and/or lead optimization projects.
“The software suite delivers a fully-automated stack of computational tools to scan the chemical space using structure-based information,” said Tatsis. “This valuable information is used to classify thousands of ideas/hypothesis in just a few hours.”
Sygnature is currently using SilcsBio’s software in both the early and later stages of the “drug design computational toolchain,” he explained.
As for how the collaboration was formed, Colin Sambrook Smith, director of computational sciences and informatics at Sygnature discovered the SilcsBio group, contacting the company nearly a year and a half ago, explained Tatsis.
In December 2017, Sygnature’s began benchmarking SilcsBio’s software suite, which Tatsis said, “yielded good results using some in-house and publicly available datasets.”
“The accurate estimation of the binding free energy of a compounds’ set could significantly accelerate the drug design cycle, by prioritizing the most prominent compounds,” he added.
SilcsBio also this year was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand its SILCS software to enable its use with biological therapeutics.
