PARIS ¿ Synt:em, a biotechnology company specializing in the development of new therapies for diseases of the central nervous system, entered into a technological collaboration with IBM for undertaking virtual ultra-high- throughput screening of drug candidates.

The French company will use an IBM xSeries supercomputer cluster in combination with its proprietary Acti:map technology, a computational predictive platform for rational drug design, to speed up the drug discovery and optimization process.

IBM¿s supercomputer cluster will be installed in Synt:em¿s main research center at its headquarters in Nnmes, in southern France, and will be dedicated to virtual screening applications, performing massively parallel computations using key components of Acti:map.

Synt:em uses this technology to develop new chemical entities for the treatment of CNS disorders, as well as making it available to third parties for the optimization of drug candidates in a broad range of therapeutic fields.

The configuration for the supercomputer cluster was developed jointly by Synt:em¿s bioinformatics staff, IBM engineers and system architects. Initially, it will consist of 76 processors providing up to 76 gigaflops of computing power, which is 15 times more than Synt:em has at the moment.

Michel Kaczorek, Synt:em¿s CEO, told BioWorld International that the company was paying a very modest amount for the hardware and would derive enormous benefit from it. It would be able to analyze experimental data on selected molecules and rapidly identify those with the properties that render them active, and thus of therapeutic potential. ¿We will be able to operate 10 to 20 times more rapidly than at present. Some calculations take us several weeks, and now we will be able to do them in a few days,¿ he said.

Synt:em¿s vice president of research and development computational drug discovery, Roger Lahana, also welcomed the additional computing power. ¿It will enable the company to screen hundreds of millions of virtual molecules designed by our unique Acti:map platform in a relatively short amount of time,¿ he said. ¿Moreover, it will allow us to improve the design of our libraries and consequently will increase the chance that compounds selected and synthesized will be pharmacologically relevant.¿

According to Kaczorek, this boost to Synt:em¿s research and development capability will enable it in particular to ¿accelerate the development of a second generation of vectors that will be designed for more specific applications.¿ Its flagship product in that area is Pep:trans, an intracellular delivery system that enables therapeutic molecules to cross complex biological membranes, such as the blood-brain barrier, and improves the uptake of therapeutic and diagnostic agents into cells.

Kaczorek confirmed that Synt:em will initiate clinical trials next year of several drugs developed using that technology. Its lead compound is for the treatment of acute pain, and the company has another two drugs in its pipeline that will enter clinical development at six- to 12-month intervals after that.

Synt:em¿s collaboration agreement with IBM is for an initial term of three years, but Kaczorek said there was ¿no reason why it should stop there.¿ He stressed that IBM is getting a lot out of the deal as well, since it is investing in the opportunity of ¿gaining a foothold in another world, the post-genomics world of predicting the activity of molecules, taking it closer to a market of enormous potential.¿