Professor Friesner is a founder of Schrödinger and Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Biomolecular Simulations at Columbia University. As chairman of Schrödinger's Scientific Advisory Board, Professor Friesner provides strategic vision and guidance for Schrödinger's scientific advancements. In this letter, Rich describes the recent equity investment from Bill Gates, and what the investment means in terms of future research and development.
As many of you may have already heard1, Schrödinger has received an investment of $10 million from Bill Gates’ investment vehicle, Cascade Investment, LLC. We at Schrödinger are very excited to have an investment partner with a serious intellectual interest in biotechnology and computational chemistry, and a deep knowledge of software technology and the associated business issues. Now I would like to share with you how the investment will impact our development efforts over the next several years, as well as Schrödinger’s long term vision of providing a next generation of solutions in biomolecular modeling and computer-aided drug discovery.
Our new investor believes in the potential of computational chemistry to transform the drug discovery process, in much the same way that increasingly inexpensive, powerful computers and associated software have revolutionized design and engineering processes in many industries, including aviation, petroleum extraction, publishing, information storage and retrieval, and so on. We all recognize that the application of computational chemistry to drug discovery is an exceptionally challenging problem, and that increasing hardware performance alone will not be sufficient to produce reliable solutions. Therefore, the investment will be used to advance the development in key scientific and technological areas, on a timescale that otherwise would not have been possible.
First, additional resources will be allocated to existing projects that we view as critical, such as induced fit docking and scoring function development. Next, we will create novel tools for ADME prediction and modeling GPCRs, both of which will require major new research efforts with a long term commitment. Finally, we intend to develop a database of protein-ligand interactions, which will represent a significant advancement over currently available commercial products.
These basic research efforts can impart benefits to our users in two key areas. Firstly, we will continue to upgrade our current suite of software products, and release new products as novel capabilities are validated. Secondly, we have for the past several years been offering computational drug discovery services, and have had considerable success working with a variety of organizations, ranging from small startups to large multinational pharmaceutical companies; the R&D efforts described above will be rapidly incorporated into our services offerings and larger scale collaborative projects. In turn, the use of new methods in a diverse set of drug discovery projects is essential for testing and validation purposes, while providing a cost-effective option for companies wanting to investigate the effectiveness of a significant computational component in their discovery efforts. To support these objectives, we will also substantially upgrade our in-house compute resources.
Our new investor is well aware of the disappointment and skepticism that have historically been associated with computer-aided drug discovery approaches over the past decades. However, we believe that the confluence of the large reduction in the cost/performance ratio of computing, the availability of massive quantities of experimental data in the public domain, and most importantly, the advances in theoretical methods and computational algorithms that underlie physics-based approaches, have set the stage for a technology transition that can yield reliable engineering solutions sufficient to build the next generation drug discovery platform. With the investment from Bill Gates, we now have the resources to make this vision a reality in the coming years. We look forward to working together with our users to bring about this transformation.
Comments and questions on Dr. Friesner's column are welcome. Please send these via email to ask-rich@schrodinger.com, and we'll address particularly interesting topics in future newsletters.