About InhibOx

InhibOx was founded in 2001 by Professor W. Graham Richards, chairman of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and world leading computational chemist. Since formation, the company has built up a significant technology platform. Its main ongoing research activities comprise the development of entirely novel computational discovery methods and associated with this, the development of Scopius a very large database of chemical structures.

InhibOx has selectively entered into a small number of long term industry collaborations under which it provides it's collaborators with computational drug discovery expertise.

InhibOx has also used its computational discovery platform to launch a small number of proprietary discovery programmes .

Sector

Academia and industry have more information about the causes of disease than ever before. The advent of the biology led research disciplines (genomics,proteomics,etc...) has generated a proliferation of therapeutic targets. However, identifying molecular inhibitors of these targets remains an immense challenge. Neither the increase in the number of therapeutic targets nor the adoption of high throughput screening, has yet to make any appreciable difference to the number of new drugs that are approved for marketing. In contrast, the costs of drug development have risen relentlessly year-on-year, for more than forty years.

The most profound challenge facing the drug development industry is at the discovery stage. The time and cost associated with experimentally testing molecular libraries against therapeutic targets necessarily restricts the size of the library to perhaps just a few hundred thousand molecular structures. What this means in practice is that high throughput screening may fail to identify sufficient (or indeed, any) drug like molecules for a promising therapeutic target, simply because the sample size is so restricted.

InhibOx believes that computational methods of screening molecules against targets, that are both accurate and capable of examining very large molecular libraries (tens of millions of molecules) represent the only way of relieving the discovery bottle neck.