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Supercomputing to speed up process for obtaining new drugs

By 30 de May de 2008November 18th, 2020No Comments
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 30.05.2008

Supercomputing to speed up process for obtaining new drugs

The biotech firm , which is dedicated to the development of intelligent software for the design of new drugs, has signed a collaboration agreement with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación ( ) to enable use of the GRID SuperScalar technology and allow its programs to be distributed automatically, thus speeding up the process through which new therapeutic molecules can be obtained and analysed.

This innovative technology, designed by BSC-CNS, enables data to be generated and captured through the interconnection of geographically decentralised computer resources, which therefore increases the volume of information that can be managed at any one time and reduces the time that the intelligent analytic programs developed by Intelligent Pharma require to perform an evaluation and present the results. According to Ignasi Belda, director of Intelligent Pharma, “the incorporation of GRID SuperScalar makes it possible to analyse 300 proteins in just four hours, a task that previously took fifteen days”.

Intelligent Pharma is a start-up firm that has emerged out of the university, chemoinformatic and bioinformatic setting and which forms part of the PCB-Santander bioincubator, located within the Barcelona Science Park. Its objectives are to develop customised scientific and computational solutions for its clients in the field of biopharmaceutical research, and to provide them with assistance in computational chemistry. The services it offers include computer-aided drug design, virtual screening, the management of compound libraries and computational toxicology. This is a pioneering initiative within Spain that enables significant reductions to be made in both the costs and time required to develop new drugs.

The company won first prize in the XII Bancaixa Young Entrepreneurs Awards and has received the support of ICREA, as well as R+D+i funding from CIDEM. It is currently backed by the Catalan government via the ACC1Ó agency and comprises a pluridisciplinary team of twelve experts in various areas: computational chemistry, artificial intelligence, biomathematics and multimedia engineering.