ACADEMIA

Tripos, a leading provider of drug discovery informatics products and chemistry research, today announced the release of SYBYL 7.1, the latest version of its leading molecular modeling environment for drug discovery research. Available immediately, SYBYL 7.1 includes several new products, including an innovative new application for ligand-based drug design, and delivers many additional improvements requested by Tripos' global base of loyal customers. "This latest release of SYBYL significantly strengthens our offering for advanced molecular modeling and computational chemistry, and is a continuation of Tripos' long-standing commitment to invest in scientific innovation," said David Baker, product manager for computational informatics at Tripos. "SYBYL 7.1 delivers significant enhancements in computational ligand-based design, enabling our customers to more rapidly understand the structural necessities for biological activity and to use this insight to better design and efficiently advance active compounds in discovery projects." Highlights of SYBYL 7.1 include the integration of new versions of former Optive Research products into the SYBYL product family, improvements to the speed and quality of UNITY searches, and the introduction of an innovative application for pharmacophore modeling and molecular alignment called GALAHAD. GALAHAD (an acronym for Genetic Algorithm with Linear Assignment for Hypermolecule Alignment of Datasets) is a powerful tool for the development of pharmacophore and molecular alignment models critical for understanding the structural basis for biological activity. Developed in collaboration with Biovitrum AB, one of Europe's largest biotechs, and a leading European university, GALAHAD creates pharmacophore and alignment models from diverse sets of flexible, active compounds, generating models that are sterically, pharmacophorically and energetically optimal. "GALAHAD represents a substantial step forward in advanced pharmacophore modeling and molecular alignment," said Dr. Robert Clark, senior director of the Tripos Informatics Research Center. "By decoupling conformational searching from alignment, the program supports fully flexible searching while freeing scientists from the need to fit all ligands to any single template molecule. GALAHAD now makes it possible to handle more ligands in a reasonable amount of time, and is unique in the detail and versatility of the models it produces." Other new products shipping with SYBYL 7.1 include ProtoPlex, acquired by Tripos through its acquisition of Optive Research Inc., and new versions of software from Optive that were previously distributed by Tripos, including Concord, DiverseSolutions, StereoPlex and CombiLibMaker. ProtoPlex is a program that generates all energetically plausible "protomers" (tautomers and protonation states) of compounds according to user-specified limits, and is a valuable ligand preparation tool used in pharmacopore perception and virtual screening analyses.