The computer-aided drug design field is seen as such an exciting new market that Silicon Graphics Inc is to lend Oxford Molecular Group Plc, Oxford, UK the workstations it needs for its collaboration with drugs giant Glaxo Wellcome Plc. The joint venture is dedicated to joint development of molecular modelling software that the duo hopes will accelerate Glaxo Wellcome’s drug discovery process worldwide (CI No 2,688). Silicon Graphics will lend its proprietary Unix workstations and peripherals to the Oxford-Glaxo collaboration and supply development software and maintenance for the programme, and justifies the largesse by saying the Oxford Molecular-Glaxo Wellcome co llaboration represents a unique approach to drug design that sets the stage for continued worldwide growth of our products in the molecular modelling market – specifically the bioinformatics and desktop chemistry markets. The work will be done at Glaxo Wellcome’s Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina, and on completion, Oxford Molecular will own the intellectual property rights for any resulting products, and will integrate the new software into its commercial product line and support the software for a fee. Glaxo Wellcome will have the right to develop the software further for its own use. The first step will be to develop software for an integrated structure-activity relationship system within 12 months, and follow-on projects may include the integration of advanced visualisation tools and additional structure-activity relationship tools – the same molecule can form itself in different ways – one can be a mirror image of the other, for example – and according to which way they form, they may act differently on the body. The planned software is intended to be suitable for general chemical analysis and reporting, and compound and combinatorial libraries, as well as conventional structure-activity relationship applications, and will run in a client-server environment.
