Market research to validate the commercial potential for a novel application that connects a multi-platform GUI to cloud-based infrastructure, to enable the rational structurebased design of new compounds for pharmaceutical R&D

The availability of crystallographic information for protein targets of pharmaceutical interest has dramatically increased in the recent years, even for those targets, such as Trans-membrane Receptors and Ion Channels, which until recently were considered extremely hard to crystallise. The availability and cost of high-performing computing through cloud-based infrastructure has also dramatically improved in the recent years. This has made the application of complex drug design methods and algorithms to the study of complex targetligand interactions accessible to pharmaceutical researchers. Cresset have an existing suite of software tools aimed at helping both computational and medicinal chemists with the design and synthesis of molecules, particularly helping with the understanding of the 3D properties of the molecules and their interactions with target proteins; however it is our belief that there is an increasing need for new tools to facilitate a rapid utilization of cloud-resources in platform-independent desktop applications. We intend to carry out market research in this area to validate our belief that a new software application, that integrates cloud resources with a traditional interactive GUI for structurebased design, will provide a paradigm shift in the speed of new molecule design and in the exploitation of available crystallographic information on protein targets of pharmaceutical interest. We believe there is a significant worldwide market opportunity for such a tool, but we strongly need to validate our concept with broader market data than we have been able to access from our current customer contacts.