Bringing Supercomputers To Drugs; BioNumerik

The biopharmaceutical industry has always been amenable to applying high-technology innovation to its R&D programs, but new US firm BioNumerik Pharmaceuticals has put in place in-house capabilities which might look more at home at NASA than a small drug-discovery company.

Founded in 1992, BioNumerik is developing new cancer and cardiovascular disease drugs using a mechanism-based drug discovery program which merges medicine, quantum mechanics, classical physics and combinatorial chemistry with computer modelling and simulation techniques which require the use of two Cray supercomputers. To give an idea of the computing power involved, Cray machines are to a desktop PC what a PC is to a pocket calculator - they are capable of conducting literally billions of mathematical operations per second.

Frederick Hausheer, the medical oncologist and recognized expert in drug discovery and supercomputing who founded the firm, told the Marketletter that Bio-Numerik begins its drug discovery process by taking a molecule and, after conducting certain laboratory tests to calibrate a proprietary computer program, simulates how it interacts with other chemicals in vivo.