Isis Innovation Licenses Molecule Docking Software to Inhibox for Drug Discovery

Despite considerable advances over recent decades, cancer, and many other diseases remain poorly treated. Many therapeutic regimes frequently subject the sufferer to severe side-effects, and resistance often develops to therapies that are initially effective. For many illnesses, the life-expectance upon diagnosis is depressingly short. There is an urgent need for new, more effective, therapeutic options.

With the chemical complexity of the genes within the body and the amount of possible interactions with other molecules the screening of drugs by physical methods is practically an endless task. Previously no reliable and computationally feasible general approach to this problem exists. However, work at the University of Oxford on computational chemistry has led to the development of a technology that provides an efficient automated method for determining the binding sites on proteins for small molecule ligands (potential drug candidates) without any a priori knowledge.

Isis Innovation has exclusively licensed this technology to Inhibox, a recent spinout company from the Chemistry Department at Oxford University. Inhibox specialises in computational approaches for the virtual screening of compounds. This combined with Inhibox's molecular database comprising of 35 million compounds will be pivotal to drug discovery.

The Cancer Screensaver Project, of which Inhibox is a partner, is a collaborative effort combining chemistry, computers, specialist software, organisations and individuals, working together to identify new anti-cancer drugs. The research centres on proteins that have been identified as possible targets for cancer therapy. Virtual screening methods have been used to computationally test a database of possible drug leads against the targets of interest to identify the best "fit", and therefore be starting points for new drug development.

Professor Graham Richards, Chairman of the Oxford Chemistry Department, and in whose group the technology was developed, commented: "The combination of the Human Genome Project and the continuing development and increasing availability of technology for determining protein structure will lead to an explosion of structural information over the next few years. Many of these proteins will be of interest for drug design, but also many will be lacking the obvious chemical starting point so often used by medicinal chemists in the past. This approach offers real opportunities for exploiting the large number of structures that will evolve from structural genomics."

Dr Paul Finn, Chief Executive of Inhibox, commented: "This licensing agreement demonstrates the value of our close links with academic collaborators and Oxford University in particular. By adding this exciting new methodology to our virtual screening aramentarium, Inhibox is continuing to build its technology base and offer an ever wider range of lead identification services to customers."

Further information about Inhibox can be found at www.inhibox.com.

For further information contact:

Dr Roger Welch
Physical Sciences Project Manager
T 01865 280854
E roger.welch@isis.ox.ac.uk