Presidio Pharmaceuticals, Numerate conclude collaboration to discover new compounds targeting HCV

Apr 24 2010

Presidio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Numerate, Inc., today announced that they have concluded their two-year collaboration to discover new compounds that target hepatitis C virus (HCV).

“Based on our positive experience, we would not hesitate to work with Numerate in the future.”

"Numerate has demonstrated that its novel technology can deliver active lead compounds in a timely and cost-effective manner. We have decided not to pursue further development of these compounds for internal reasons," said Omar K. Haffar, Ph.D., Presidio Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, who added, "Based on our positive experience, we would not hesitate to work with Numerate in the future."

Guido Lanza, President and Chief Executive Officer of Numerate, stated, "We were very pleased to have had the opportunity to work with Presidio's world-class HCV group. We believe the compounds delivered demonstrate the power of our drug design technology, and we plan to continue to work actively in the HCV area."

To discover the novel lead compounds, Numerate scientists ran their platform on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allowing them to search through spaces of hundreds of millions of compounds to identify those with the highest probability of activity against HCV. Those compounds were then synthesized and their properties tested in the laboratory.