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June 10, 2002 UMBI SPINOFF VERACHEM LLC TO SPEED DRUG DISCOVERY
 TORONTO, Can.(BIO2002)--Biotech companies using genomics to learn the molecular basis of human diseases will need a competitive edge in finding targeted compounds - potential therapeutics - to bind and disable disease-related proteins.
Enter VeraChem LLC (www.verachem.com). The latest spin-off from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute develops and markets interactive software for computer-aided drug-design in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, and provides related partnering and consulting services. The new company grows out of a strong and highly regarded research effort at UMBI's Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (CARB) focused on the application of theory, computer models and informatics to non-covalent binding and molecular recognition. CARB has been a leading force in protein structure studies since 1984. The company was founded by Professor Michael K. Gilson of CARB, with Drs. Michael J. Potter and Hillary S. R. Gilson. "Many new biotech companies focus initially on molecular biology and need user-friendly software and support as they address the challenges of developing small molecule compounds that will go after their targets," Gilson says. "We are creating software tools that will make the power of computer-aided drug-discovery accessible to biotech companies that are just getting started in this process." The company is using new computational methods developed in the Gilson lab for modeling the physical interactions of candidate drug compounds with protein targets. The software allows for the flexible rearrangement of both the compounds being tested and the binding site of the protein, and can model binding with fast, simple models or with detailed models that more accurately capture the physical chemistry. "Computer-aided drug-design is a hard problem -- harder than using computational fluid dynamics to design an airplane, for example," explains Gilson, "but we can markedly increase the chance that the compounds tested in the lab bind the target. And the better the yield, the lower the cost." Gilson says a key goal is to help companies avoid the need for the massive investments normally required to establish a computational chemistry capability. VeraChem will make its innovative software accessible to a wide range of users through the creation of unique interfaces that guide even inexperienced users through each task, and by offering inexpensive software that runs on desktop PCs. A three year Small Business Technology Transfer Research Grant from the National Institutes of Health will allow six research/developers to be hired at VeraChem and the Gilson lab in 2002 to advance the underlying methods and to create the software. The first product is slated for launch in 2003. # # # The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute was mandated by the state of Maryland legislature in 1985 as "a new paradigm of state economic development in biotech-related sciences." With five major research and education centers across Maryland, UMBI is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of biotechnology. The centers are the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology in Rockville; Center for Agricultural Biotechnology in College Park; and Center of Marine Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology Center, and the Institute of Human Virology, all in Baltimore.
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