LANCASTER, CA -- Simulations Plus, Inc. (OTCBB:SIMU) a leading provider of ADMET neural net and absorption simulation software for pharmaceutical research, today announced that it has released a major upgrade of its widely used QMPRPlus(TM) software, which predicts a number of important properties of new chemical compounds with only their molecular structure as input. These predicted properties can often determine whether a new chemical is likely to be useful as a new drug, without the need to run laboratory experiments. "Millions of new chemicals are designed by pharmaceutical and biotech companies every year. Almost every one of them is unsuitable as a drug -- they're `losers.' Enormous resources are wasted every year measuring properties of these losers," said Walt Woltosz, chairman and chief executive officer of Simulations Plus. "We can now predict certain key properties accurately enough to eliminate many of the losers without running laboratory experiments, saving considerable time and money. Based on our proprietary artificial neural networks, QMPRPlus generates exceptionally high quality predictions for critical molecular properties, and it does so at lightning speed -- over 300,000 compounds per hour on a PC. We know of no competing software that combines such accuracy and speed." "This new version of QMPRPlus adds two very important predictions, percent of plasma protein binding, and volume of distribution, to the list of key properties already predicted by QMPRPlus," said Dr. Michael Bolger, director of Life Sciences for the Company. "Plasma protein binding is a measure of how much of a drug gets attached to proteins in the blood, such as albumin. The portion of a drug that binds to these proteins is not available to enter body tissues and do its job, so a larger dose might be required. For some other drugs, when the drug is bound to plasma proteins, it is protected from breakdown in the liver and might last longer in the body, so less frequent dosing might be appropriate. Volume of distribution gives scientists an idea of how widely a drug would distribute throughout the body -- large volume of distribution means the drug goes into many different kinds of tissues and fluids or is highly bound to plasma proteins in the blood, while small volume of distribution means that the drug is more concentrated in the body. Depending on the type of disease being treated, you might want either one. Based on considerations like these, pharmaceutical scientists can now identify which compounds in a huge database would be more suitable to take forward into development for a particular disease." "This upgrade is part of the ongoing support we provide as an integral part of our annual license business model," said Ron Creeley, vice president of Marketing and Sales. "We reinvest a significant portion of our annual license revenues into improving the products. This release also adds a number of user convenience features that have resulted both from customer requests and in-house development activities."