MARYLAND INDUSTRIAL PARTNERSHIPS

MIPS Project Detail:

SilcsBio, LLC

Validation of SILCS Molecular Modeling Software

Project #

5212

 | 

Round 

52

 | 

Aug 2013

Back to Projects Home

Company

SilcsBio, LLC

Baltimore

Baltimore City

 County
, Maryland
  |  
Founded: 

2012

  |  

Company Description: 

SilcsBio started operations in April, 2013, based on licensed intellectual property developed by Alexander MacKerell. SilcsBio is commercializing analysis tools with novel software capabilities for drug design, which could lead to the discovery of new molecules with decreased development costs. SilcsBio’s first products are designed to improve the modeling of drug candidate-protein interactions.

MIPS Project

Round 

52

 - 

Aug 2013

Validation of SILCS Molecular Modeling Software

Project #

5212

 | 

MIPS Round 

52

 | 

Starting Date: 

Aug 2013

MIPS Project Challenge:
The broad goal of this MIPS project was to validate SilcsBio’s molecular modeling software.

Project Scope:
Through this MIPS project, researchers planned to validate the company’s methodology in the context of in silico database screening (a.k.a.“docking”), to identify novel inhibitors of therapeutically relevant proteins. They next planned to validate the SilcsBio methodology in the context of optimizing known drug candidates.

The results of the MIPS research have been fully integrated into our software and sold to our customers around the world.
-
Ken Malone, CEO, Slicsbio, LLC

Results: 

The research conducted through this MIPS project contributed to three publications, including one in November, 2016, in the Journal of Computational Chemistry, that explained how SilcsBio’s product, single-step free energy perturbation (SSFEP), demonstrated equal or more accurate results than standard free energy perturbation (FEP), but a thousand times faster.

In July, 2016, the company was awarded an NIH Phase II SBIR grant for $1.3 million to develop new computer-aided drug design (CADD) software.

SilcsBio now has six employees.

The company has completed direct sales to pharmaceutical customers worldwide.

SilcsBio continues to sponsor research at UMB.

SilcsBio competes in the rapidly growing $6 billion/year bioinformatics industry. Bioinformatics can be seen as a series of individual tools (known as services) that assist at each stage of drug discovery and development. These services are generally packaged together using a Service-Oriented Architecture. The SOA enables the inputs and outputs of each service to communicate. Because it is of little value to use one service without a few or many of the others, the companies that control the SOAs have a dominant control on the market channels. At the heart of the problem with the services involved in drug lead discovery is their inaccurate representation of lead-protein interactions. SilcsBio’s first product directly addresses the failures of other algorithms to properly model drug candidate-protein interactions. Thus, the company’s entrylevel market opportunity is to displace the service that currently maps protein surfaces with SilcsBio’s technology.
(Source: SilcsBio)

Principal Investigator:

Alexander

 

Mackerell, Jr.

Prof of Pharmaceutical Sciences & Director, Computer-Aided Drug Design Ctr, UMD School of Pharmacy

Project Manager: 

Kelli

 

Booth

COO

Technologies:

Chemical Engineering / Chemistry