Proteus International Plc has yet to record any turnover (figures, page 7) yet hopes for the computer-aided drug design company are so high that the market values it at about UKP125m: the company says that development of its Prometheus system has accelerated and new drug receptor approach reduces some 10,000 hours of supercomputing time to about 10 hours, enabling predition of the details and strength of binding of drugs to enzymes, receptors and DNA without prior knowledge of the location of the binding site; new classes of neural network are being developed that could lead to direct prediction of three-dimensional structures of proteins; all such studies, it says, are automated using its proprietary Global langauge for molecular modelling and drug design, which has been recoded for Lambda calculus to create new types of computer-aided reasoning; on the hardware side, Proteon has added a Convex Computer Corp C 3240 alongside its C220, and a massively parallel system is to be linked into the system in June.
