From EDA to drug-discovery!

Some EDA veterans are using the skills they developed in EDA to simulate the behavior of therapeutics. Sounds cool; isn't it? The company is CellWorks Group. They are in stealth mode and their website doesn't reveal anything about what they are doing now.

CellWorks Group is founded by two of my ex-colleagues from Cadence - Pradeep Fernandes and Taher Abbasi. Pradeep was the Business Unit head of RTL Compiler (RC) synthesis and Taher was the Director for Field Operations for RC. Then CWG's India Managing Director is Anand Anandkumar who was Magma India's MD before joining CWG. Pradeep, Taher, Anand etc are all EDA veterans.

Anand's linked-in profile mentions CWG as an extremely exciting and hot startup  which is in the area of Pharma therapeutics, using a novel principle called Virtual Proteomics. This company has the opportunity to revolutionize how drugs (particularly combination therapies) will be designed and brought to market.

Pradeep's linked-in profile reveals this about CWG: CWG is creating a comprehensive library of disease platforms. These platforms enable the predictive analysis of drug-disease interaction in-silco. This predictive analysis enables safer and more potent drugs to be designed in a shorter time, by enabling fast-failing and fast-scaling methodologies.

CellWorks started an India R&D center in bangalore in 2007. This news reveals some more information about CWG:

1. CellWork Research India Limited (CRIL)’s research focus would be in the areas of oncology, inflammation, metabolic disorders, CNS and Skin.
2. Their research is based on Systems Biology approach.
3. It involves development of in silico platforms of disease physiology at the metabolic and bio-chemical pathway level
4. The in-silico approach enables drug discovery teams to use these platforms as a virtual experimental system.
5. The drug discovery teams would have the benefit of using the in silico system in conjunction with currently used in vitro and in vivo techniques.

Why am I so excited about this news? There are two reasons:

1. I'm happy to see the EDA knowledge being applied in Bio-Medical research. We actually do cool stuffs in EDA :-).
2. I always feel that mankind should have overcome killer deseases like cancer by now. But the reality is that we're still not able to prevent and cure cancer completely. I look for the day when there will be some vaccines against cancer. I hope efforts like CWG will bring us closer to that day when we shall overcome cancer.