Drug Design (DD) delivers drug design solutions to drug discovery projects by a combination of innovative knowledge-driven in silico approaches. The aims are to aid and expedite Siena Biotech's drug discovery process contributing its drug design, computational and cheminformatic skills in a concerted synergistic sharing of expertise and competencies with all functions in Siena Biotech.

Key contributions of DD are:

• Computational input into high-quality drug design with an aim to build knowledge as well as progressing projects, with priority given to array design and good experimental design. These focused arrays are subsets of larger virtual libraries to allow further exploitation and refinement and to enable rapid follow-up on interesting molecules. The group also considers known templates and compound selection based on product space with the aim of providing a compound collection that covers drug-like areas of chemical space.
• HT virtual screening and cheminformatic using proprietary platform named Nucleo.
• Developing algorithm based tools for multiple and single objective array design in collaboration with IT Unit.
• Where possible using protein-ligand or protein-protein information to pursue novel templates/mechanisms of action. Including use of whole molecule and fragment based approaches.
• Cheminformatics - Providing a range of data visualization and analysis tools, ligand and library design tools. The focus is on determining, analyzing and using trends in data rather than limited data points.
• Contributing (in collaboration with Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Profiling) to a knowledge driven strategy for constructing and maintaining a drug-like compound collection