Moleculomics, a spin out company of the Institute of Life Science at Swansea University, has recently delivered an in silico drug discovery software platform for the UK Ministry of Defence (MediWales, 2017).

The software tool named TargetPath, developed for the identification of protein antibiotic or anti-bacterial targets within a pathogen, will be used by the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) for the development of antimicrobials to meet the UK’s current and future defence and security needs.

TargetPath brings together the protein structural modelling of Moleculomics, applied to four bacterial proteomes and the affinity docking of extensive compound or drug datasets to these proteins, all visualised by a web-friendly interface. This, for the first time, provides the end user a single coherent bioinformatics tool that extends all the way from genome-level information, through protein modelling, to ligand docking and analysis of potential protein-ligand interactions.

Dr Jon David, Dstl technical partner on the project said “A key innovation of TargetPath is the comparative structural proteomics tool – it enables searching of whole proteomes to return proteins with homologous domains. It is this functionality which gives potential for the development of antimicrobials which have the capacity to treat more than one bacterial infection”.

Dr Jonathan Mullins, CEO of Moleculomics CEO, said “We are very pleased to have successfully delivered such a large and ambitious project. Populated with over 28 million detailed molecular interactions, this platform represents a world first in terms of communicating molecular information at this scale”.

The recent delivery of TargetPath and similar tools such as Yeast3DProteome are testament to the success of Moleculomics in translational bioinformatics research. These drug development platforms can be populated with any number of different organisms or drugs, functionality which will underpin products such as Human3DProteome, which will be launched in early 2017.