The 20th Anniversary!

This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, and Discngine was very excited to  cross the Atlantic for the occasion!

The event took place in person at the Hynes Convention Center, in the center of Boston and could be followed virtually.

With Bio-IT's return as a hybrid event, the organizers surpassed themselves. The three-day event combined more than 150 presentations in 12 tracks, multiple panel discussions, breakout sessions, and poster sessions covering the latest trends in software solutions, data management, and innovations that propel life science research forward.

This was the first event in the Americas that Discngine had participated in since the pandemic, and we were so happy to be there among the other 2000 participants.

It was a real confirmation for us that while remote working solutions can help bring together people who are actually spread across the globe, they cannot replace the warm feeling of human interaction and its benefits for businesses

Experiencing Virtual Reality

Last year, we announced our partnership with Nanome Inc., a company bringing Virtual Reality (VR) into the hands of drug design scientists.

With this collaboration, our goal was to make the structural knowledge centralized in 3decision available in the three-dimensional virtual space, enabling a unique real-time and enhanced collaborative experience, aiming to facilitate the drug design ideation process. (see our press release) 

This all became real during the Bio-IT!

With 3decision in VR, people have been able to experience a new way to interact with proteins and ligands in 3D and, at the same time, to access new structural insights thanks to the 3decision integration. While it requires effort for the brain to construct a 3D representation from multiple images of a binding site, VR makes it effortless. You can just “walk around” the pocket and very easily identify possible regions where to grow the ligand, assess how deep the pocket is, its shape and the possible interactions that can be formed with the ligand.

Thanks to the 3decision integration, which easily allows the retrieval of similar binding sites, the scientists can compare pockets and their bound ligands to gather ideas for a new design.

But this is not the only benefit of using VR in a drug design project. The real value lies in the collaboration it brings to drug design teams!

Imagine being able to gather medicinal chemists, computational chemists, structural biologists, and a project manager from different sites, in the same room for a one-hour ideation session: with all their data accessible in a few clicks. This enhanced collaborative experience can greatly speed up the design process of a new compound instead of using traditional tools.

This is what Novartis has been able to experience by integrating their NIBR (Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research) immersive virtual drug design world, named “NIBR”verse, with Autofocus, an internal chemistry design web application which combines advanced 2D and 3D tools for drug design (developed by Discngine).

Are you interested in discovering what Virtual Reality can do for Collaborative Structure-Based Drug Design?

Join us for our next Discngine Labs on June 23rd at 5:00 PM (Paris Time)!

Wilian Cortopassi, Senior Scientists at the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research (NIBR), and Rishi Gupta, Associate Director, Novartis, will present the work of his team in building the “NIBR”Verse: the multidimensional space that brings together data and peers from all over the world in a single (virtual) place for effective collaborations in structure-based drug design.

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on the current and future opportunities of Virtual Reality for Drug Discovery. Steve McCloskey from the leading VR software company Nanome, will chair the discussion where industry experts and early adopters will share their thoughts and experiences on the topic.

Ever wondered how Virtual Reality for Drug Design looks like in practice?