STORY UPDATE
LANCASTER, Calif.—October 9, 2006—In just under one year, Simulations Plus announced, it has recovered the costs of investments made in the purchase of Sage Informatics and assets of the former Bioreason. According to company CFO Momoko Beran, the two acquisitions cost Simulations Plus approximately $1 million, which has been offset by monies gained through license renewals and new licenses of its ClassPharmer product line.
LANCASTER, Calif.—In late August Simulations Plus Inc., a provider of simulation software, acquired all the outstanding assets of Santa Fe, N.M.-based Sage Informatics LLC, a cheminformatics company whose products are used by computational and medicinal chemists in early drug discovery. In the process, Simulations Plus widened its reach from its traditional area of ADME and toxicity simulation to earlier in the drug discovery research process.
As part of the acquisition, David Miller, Sage's founder and president ,agreed to join Simulations Plus as senior scientist and product manager. Financial terms of the sale were not disclosed.
For Simulations Plus, Sage's products—which include ChemTK, ChemTK Lite and Chem TKX—can help it provide a more complete suite of in silico prediction and molecular modeling products when used in combination with its ADMET Modeler and ADMET Predictor. "With all of these tools, we think they can work hand-in-hand to provide both in silico screening and lead optimization to make researchers more efficient," says Walt Woltosz, chairman and CEO of Simulations Plus.
The key to achieving these efficiencies, Woltosz says, is by using data sets generated by computational and medicinal chemists using the Chem TK line of products to generate a large number of molecules that possess a common substructure and affinity for binding to a particular target. The data on these molecules can then be fed into ADMET Predictor where researchers can set thresholds on a wide range of factors including pKa, human effective permeability, models of a range of solubility properties, toxicity and many more. The net result is a rank order of the molecules based on the researchers' parameters, which should help them determine which molecules warrant further study.
David Miller, founder of Sage Informatics, says he first became acquainted with the management at Simulations Plus in 2004 when he began working with them to integrate data the Sage software generated with Simulations Plus' absorption simulation software called GastroPlus. Over that time, it became apparent that the software each brought to market was complementary.
"It also made sense for me to join with Simulations Plus," Miller says, "because I was at the point where I wanted to grow the product well beyond what it was and that would have required significant additional resources."
