PROCESSORS

TurboWorx, Inc. today announced that Karo Bio AB (Reuters: KARO.ST), a leading drug discovery company for the development of precision drugs to treat major diseases in the field of nuclear receptors, has implemented the TurboWorx Suite of high-performance workflow automation products. TurboWorx recently unveiled the suite as part of its Research and Development (R&D) Workflow Collaboration Initiative. The Swedish company has deployed the TurboWorx products in its Linux computing environment, which includes Linux workstations and a Linux cluster, to enable its computational chemistry and biology groups to develop, automate, execute, and share scientific computational workflows. "TurboWorx uniquely offers a sophisticated, yet cost effective solution for developing automated workflows," said Konrad Koehler, principal scientist, Karo Bio AB. "The TurboWorx product suite was easy to install and was up and running in less than an hour. It is enabling our scientists to create more complex workflows, allowing us to easily document our work, increase productivity, pursue a greater number of projects, and, ultimately, accelerate the drug discovery process. TurboWorx is providing us with an excellent way to deliver advanced bio- and chemo-informatics tools to our research scientists in a secure environment." The TurboWorx Suite is comprised of three products supporting workflow automation and collaboration. TurboWorx Builder is a development environment in which components and workflows can be created, saved, tested, and imported/exported to other Builder environments. TurboWorx Group is a single-user environment that enables users to run workflows on small networks and clusters. Finally, TurboWorx Enterprise is a powerful multi-user system that extends workflow capabilities to heterogeneous enterprise computing environments. Karo Bio's computational scientists are utilizing TurboWorx software to seamlessly integrate disparate software applications into a number of workflows that, while individually complex, are still well understood by a large number of individuals within the organization. This is enabling Karo Bio to make use of a wide range of proprietary, internally developed, third party, and open source programs within a common framework supporting collaboration and reuse of all components. As a result, Karo Bio's scientists no longer need to spend valuable time repeatedly recreating commonly used components and workflows. Karo Bio's modeling group intends to create workflows to automate sequence alignments and load these alignments into the Karo Bio Internal Target (KBIT) database. The group also plans to automate common modeling tasks such as virtual screening (2D to 3D structure conversion, protein structure preparation, docking, and post-processing of docked ligands), combinational library design (virtual screening, ADMET predictions, and diversity criteria), and the batch calculation and loading of property predictions (log P, pKa, log D, ADMET). "Unlike any other products on the market today, the TurboWorx Suite is designed to support integrated workflows for technical computing and address scientists' and researchers' needs to achieve commonality in how they process data," said Jeff Augen, president and CEO of TurboWorx. "We are breaking down a barrier which has increasingly hindered collaboration between individuals, groups, companies, and universities for many years. We are pleased to announce this relationship with Karo Bio, only weeks following the launch of our new product set, and look forward to helping the company automate and accelerate a key function in its R&D process."