Drug design company Proteus Molecular Design Ltd has harnessed supercomputing power, along with its Prometheus molecular modelling system, to reduce the development time for drugs from around three to four years to three months. Coming up with a winning formula for drugs can involve the analysis of thousands of molecular structures. Prometheus speeds up this process by using neural networks to analyse and rapidly eliminate the thousands down to handful of structures, which can then be researched in more detail. The system has taken around 20 years – and millions of pounds – to develop and is written in a blend of the company’s proprietary Global language and Fortran 77. It is so powerful that the Marple, Cheshire-based company is planning to add a Convex Computer Corp model 3240 supercomputer and Massively Parallel Processor to its existing a Convex 220, in order to cope (CI No 2,096). Proteus, operating company of Proteus International Plc, has yet to bring a new product to market. But this does not seem to have obstructed share values which have continue to soar from 84 pence to around UKP4.70 in two years – reflecting the value placed on Prometheus. The company, formed in 1987 employs 127 people and is currently working on 26 potential products that include treatments for Human Immunodeficiency Virus and cancer. The first of these is expected to surface in two years’ time.
