Sygnature Discovery has announced a collaboration with software firm SilcsBio.
The deal means that Sygnature, an integrated drug discovery and pre-clinical services company, will be able to access SilcsBio’s SILCS (Site Identification by Ligand Competitive Saturation) and SSFEP (Single Step Free Energy Perturbation) software, giving Sygnature’s researchers the opportunity to be able to offer clients the benefits of these powerful techniques in their drug discovery projects.
The software identifies binding site hot spots on a protein’s surface, which could potentially include ‘cryptic pockets’ – binding sites for which little structural information is available.
The software has also demonstrated success in ranking compound binding affinities to target proteins. In particular, the SSFEP approach is about 1000-fold faster than the more widely used FEP methodology. It achieves this speed by post-processing molecular dynamics simulation data of a ligand, and using it to estimate the alchemical free energy change of chemically modifying that ligand.
“We’re delighted to be collaborating with Sygnature Discovery to bring the advantages of our drug design software to Sygnature’s projects and customers. This collaboration is very meaningful to us as Sygnature continues to be a great partner and it opens the door to new markets for SilcsBio”, says Ken Malone, chief executive officer of SilcsBio.
In the past six months, Sygnature has applied the SilcsBio software suite successfully in various hit-to-lead and lead optimisation projects.
