Moleculomics In Silico Discovery Inc, part of Moleculomics group, has received funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program.

The funding, together with business advisory services, will support the development of a predictive technology to develop a set of tools and processes which will discern between a drug destined for legislative approval and a drug that will be withdrawn due to toxic effects.

“It’s an exciting development that addresses head-on why certain compounds make good, generally safe, drugs and others are associated with more toxicity to the human body, by profiling the intricate interactions that they have with many hundreds of receptors” said Dr Jonathan Mullins, CEO of the Moleculomics group, a spin-out of the Institute of Life Science at Swansea University.

These are important factors for such a large and profitable industry, currently worth $300bn a year, but set to worth $400bn within three years. On average it takes two hundred and seventy drug development projects to result in one product release and failures are usually identified during clinical trials.

Dr Will Krawszik, Head of Operations for Moleculomics, said “Thanks to the funding provided by IRAP, this project will provide a tool which will predict the outcome of a drug development project before even entering the laboratory; all using the latest High Performance Computing (supercomputer) technology and some highly innovative algorithms.”

This article was updated on August 27th 2018 to state the original source, from MediWales, is no longer available.