Aureus gets first customer for discovery Web portal

PARIS—After announcing the launch of its AurWEB portal in mid-March, Aureus Pharma, a provider of knowledge management solutions to accelerate discovery in the life sciences industry, has its first customer subscription to the service, in the form of Swiss-German company Origenis, which offers services in drug design, synthesis and characterization.

AurWEB is a Web portal designed to enable access to all of Aureus Pharma's knowledge databases and analysis applications.

Available on a subscription basis, the portal offers customers flexible usage of Aureus' comprehensive knowledge databases and "brings the power of Aureus Pharma solutions to a wider community of life science researchers," says Dr. André Michel, CEO of Aureus Pharma. Databases accessible through AurWEB include AurSCOPE GPCR, Ion Channel, Kinase, ADME/Drug-Drug Interactions and hERG.

"AurWEB represents a valuable, exemplary data source," says Dr. Michael Thormann, managing director of Origenis GmbH. "We use AurWEB to turn highly relevant knowledge into powerful models for our technology platform. This accelerates our drug discovery projects and improves the quality of the resulting compounds."

AurWEB's flexible access to biological and chemical activity data for important drug target families will complement Origenis approach to discover novel target-focused drug candidates, Aureus' Michel predicts—something he expects more companies to tap into as well—in areas ranging from chemistry work to biology to proteomics.

"While there is a vast amount of data available in the scientific literature, there is no easy way to optimally exploit this data and use this as a source of knowledge and innovation to accelerate the drug discovery process," Michel says. "Our goal is to provide scientists and executives in drug discovery with extensive validated datasets from the literature. To accomplish this, the data has to be structured with high-quality standards and cutting-edge technology and also be compatible with the systems already in use for internal data storage and management in the pharmaceutical industry."