Drug design collaboration

Optibrium – a developer of software for drug discovery – has entered into a collaboration with the University of Nottingham to provide students with the opportunity to design new drugs.

Optibrium’s StarDrop software will be available to a number of 4th year MSci Chemistry project students at the University as part of their training in modern drug discovery. They will use it to aid in the design of potential new candidate compounds for integrin inhibition in fibrotic diseases and malaria, as part of their collaboration with GSK.

Mr Thomas McInally, Business Science Fellow in Medicinal Chemistry at the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratories for Sustainable Chemistry, the University of Nottingham said: “Teaching industry-relevant skills and giving students access to the very latest technologies are critical to develop the next generation of successful drug discovery researchers. Optibrium is supporting us in achieving this by providing access to their world-class StarDrop software and considerable expertise in medicinal chemistry.”

Applying Optibrium’s StarDrop software and its unique drug discovery capabilities will enable the students to, for example, characterise properties for known drugs, understand the structure-activity relationships in existing project data and then design new candidate compounds using industry-leading predictive models.