Sanofi has signed an expanded deal with Schrödinger, the computational chemistry folks. Here’s something from the press release:
Schrödinger has made a number of key scientific breakthroughs in recent years in the areas of protein and ligand structure determination and potency prediction that promise to have a transformative impact on the discovery of drugs. The collaboration with Sanofi aims to deploy this and related technologies at a level that is unprecedented in the pharmaceutical industry.
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I’d guess that this is going to involve the FEP calcuations that they’ve been talking about (blogged here). Schrödinger is also very strong in doing molecular dynamics simulations (for similar reasons), although, as with everything in this field, there’s room to argue about what that can do for you. So this will be very interesting to watch. I’m glad that Schrödinger’s technology is being given such a thorough real-world test, because that’s the only way to see what it can do.