Optibrium will be officially launching the next generation of Stardrop featuring the Nova module at the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Exposition at 27-31 March 2011 in Anaheim, California.
This intuitive platform helps to guide scientists' decisions to quickly identify compounds with a high chance of success for their drug-discovery project.
Nova is a completely new module within Stardrop 5, helping pharmaceutical and biotech companies to search for high-quality drugs by generating new chemistry ideas, prioritised against specific property profile requirements when making critical decisions in drug discovery.
The Nova module stimulates the search for high-quality compounds by generating new chemistry ideas, prioritised against defined property profile requirements.
It facilitates the search for prospective drug candidates by expanding the chemistry around an initial compound based on medicinal chemistry transformation rules, ensuring that they are chemically feasible.
Independent tests proved that more than 94 per cent of generated compound structures were acceptable to medicinal chemists.
In addition to an initial library of more than 200 transformations derived from literature and provided with Nova, chemistry knowledge can be transferred between medicinal chemists by defining their own transformation rules, flagging favourites and grouping rules tailored to specific goals.
Nova provides the user with complete control of which transformations they wish to apply and enables a rigorous exploration of possibilities while searching for compounds with improved properties.
Nova ensures a broad exploration for new chemical ideas and, combined with Stardrop's existing probabilistic scoring, chemical space visualisation, glowing molecule and predictive modelling capabilities, helps to quickly focus on high-quality chemistry and speed up hit-to-lead and lead optimisation.
Example applications include rigorously exploring the chemistry around new hits to identify those most likely to provide access to good drug-like properties; searching for new chemical strategies to overcome issues in lead optimisation, including lead hopping; and identifying opportunities for patent busting.
The Nova module is an addition to the existing suite of plug-in modules for the Stardrop platform, including a suite of predictive ADME QSAR models, quantum mechanics-based models to predict the regioselectivity and vulnerability to P450 metabolism and the Auto-Modeller that automatically generates and validates high-quality QSAR models tailored to a project's chemistry and data.
Furthermore, Stardrop 5 provides a comprehensive range of upgrades and significant new features, including enhanced data visualisation and new functionality to perform mathematical calculations within Stardrop, helping users to explore data and produce graphs, histograms and chemical spaces that can be easily included in reports.
These build on Stardrop's capabilities, such as: glowing molecule, which visualises the influence of different regions of potential drugs to interactively guide the design of improved molecules and; probabilistic scoring, which allows the user to objectively compare compounds against a weighted profile of required properties to discover the compounds most likely to yield successful results.
