Redesign Science and OpenEye Scientific announce strategic partnership

Partnership will advance both firms' positions in the field of molecular dynamics-based drug discovery

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OpenEye Scientific; Redesign Science

Jan 07, 2020, 12:00 ET

NEW YORK and SANTA FE, N.M., Jan. 7, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Redesign Science and OpenEye Scientific are pleased to announce that they have entered into a strategic partnership to integrate OpenEye's pioneering Orion computational platform into Redesign's drug discovery platform.

The practice of drug discovery has radically transformed in recent decades as advances in computational power and simulation methods have thrown open the doors to "rational" drug discovery, which focuses on discovering new pharmaceuticals through an intentional, first-principles approach that contrasts with the trial-and-error approaches favored by previous generations.

OpenEye is a recognized leader in the field of cheminformatics software for drug discovery, providing a reliable API customers use to build highly customizable programs and workflows. Its newly released Orion computational platform, built on AWS, extends this capability by serving as a highly scalable cloud-based computational analysis system, bringing together all of OpenEye's previously developed tools in a single, customizable and massively scalable interface.

Redesign Science will integrate these tools into its own molecular dynamics platform, allowing it to scale its drug discovery efforts more rapidly. According to Redesign cofounder and CTO Haotian Li: "At Redesign, we develop highly customized workflows for each project, and leveraging Orion brings reproducibility, flexibility, and speed to key parts of our development process as we deploy these workflows on the cloud. This technology means we can scale up our business without having to scale up human costs and development times at the same rate - it is a major key to Redesign's growth."

OpenEye sees not just economic benefit but also strategic rationale in this partnership and took an equity stake in Redesign during its recently-closed seed investment round. "OpenEye is committed to advancing rational drug discovery by providing an evolving platform of state-of-the-art methods for pharmaceutical development and analysis. We are excited by Redesign's vision and how we might help them achieve their goals. We see cloud computing as central to the future of our industry, and investing in Redesign is a part of our broader strategy of engagement with dynamic, revolutionary enterprises," says OpenEye CEO, Anthony Nicholls.

Redesign is currently advancing drug discovery programs with multiple biotech partners through the integration of the Orion platform with its existing molecular dynamics and virtual screening technologies.

About Redesign Science - Founded in 2017, Redesign Science is focused on delivering novel chemical matter to biotech partners. Redesign's mission is to develop and optimize new therapeutics for novel or poorly understood targets, and to drastically reduce its partners' time investment in early-stage drug discovery.

About OpenEye Scientific – OpenEye has built a reputation as a scientific leader in the field of molecular design based on two decades of delivering useful applications and programming toolkits. Our scientific approach has focused on the power of molecular 3D structure to inform and guide, in particular via the concept of shape similarity. We have changed industry perception of what is possible with the speed, robustness and scalability of our tools and have recently built these into a ground-up, cloud-native platform, Orion. Combining unlimited computation and storage with powerful tools for data sharing, visualization and analysis in an open development platform, Orion offers unprecedented capabilities for drug discovery and optimization. OpenEye Scientific is a privately held company headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with offices in Boston, Massachusetts, Cologne, Germany, Strasbourg, France and Tokyo, Japan. For further information on the company and its products, see www.eyesopen.com.