Optibrium, a developer of software for drug discovery, has announced that AstraZeneca has signed an agreement to license Optibrium’s StarDrop software. The agreement will see the global deployment of StarDrop and the ADME-QSAR and Auto-Modeller modules to AstraZeneca’s researchers.
StarDrop is a software suite that helps to deliver optimally balanced, effective drugs. By quickly highlighting diverse, high-quality compounds, StarDrop dramatically reduces the time it takes to find effective leads and then transform them into candidate drugs, which will have a high probability of success downstream. StarDrop works by evaluating complex data, which is often uncertain because of experimental variability or predictive error.
In scoring this data, the software aids decision-making by guiding and validating the direction of research projects, and which compounds are prioritised. Its tools then enable researchers to efficiently explore ways to further improve their chemistries. StarDrop’s ADME QSAR plug-in module enables the prediction of a broad range of ADME and physicochemical properties using a suite of high-quality QSAR models. The Auto-Modeller module provides access to the tools needed to produce validated, predictive models of both novice and expert users’ own chemistry and data.
Dr Patrick Barton, AstraZeneca DMPK, commented: ‘Drug metabolism, together with the prediction of human kinetics and dose, is a multi-objective optimisation problem. We seek a compromise between potency, selectivity, pharmacokinetic and toxicological profiles to discover a safe and efficacious drug. Currently, we undertake an empirical approach to optimisation which relies on experience and often leads to inconsistent decision making. The introduction of StarDrop will improve objective decision making and decrease the timelines of our projects.’
