SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SeaChange Pharmaceuticals Inc., a privately held platform and products pharmaceuticals company, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SEAware™, its proprietary Similarity Ensemble Approach (SEA) software, that allows analysis and visualization tools for prediction of drug and other small molecule activity and toxicity against biological targets. Three levels of software are available directly from the SeaChange website.
“Our pharma, academic, and government partners have found SEA most valuable in-house, where it’s fast, easy, and secure,” said Michael Keiser, Founder and COO. “We’ve had many requests to make SEA available and we’re excited to respond today with SEAware™. It’s a turn-key package that has 10x the calculation speed and a new, intuitive interface—a ‘google for drug targets.’ In the most extensive suite, users can leverage their own proprietary data or modify available public libraries. These advances let our clients explore what-if questions about drug off-target effects at the press of a button.”
Nicholas Hodge, Chief Scientific Officer, pointed out that “preclinical in vitro and in vivo testing of drug candidates against the increasing number of biological targets remains cost-prohibitive. One of the best uses of SEAware™ is as a predictive ‘filter’ to reduce the testing of molecules for activity or toxicity to a manageable number of targets. As clients become familiar with the method, and build curated reference libraries, the predictive accuracy – already high – will continue to improve. Over time, SEA will become the method of choice for target, mechanism and adverse effect identification of drugs and leads. With a preclinical opportunity cost of a million dollars a day added to random screening costs, successful application of the method can repay the cost of software rapidly.”
About SEAware™
The SEAware™ software package harnesses the power of our Similarity Ensemble Approach (SEA) to offer unprecedented utility for predicting drug effects [1]. It enables exploration of new therapeutic uses for known drugs [2]; mechanism of drug action [3]; causes of side effects and adverse drug reactions [4]; and multi-target activity and polypharmacology [5].
Use SEAware™ Primary to query your individual small molecules against the public ChEMBL database in our easy-to-use graphical interface. Leverage target predictions across an entire screening campaign using SEAware™ Professional, featuring a full command line interface for pipeline integration. Harness the true power of the Similarity Ensemble Approach (SEA) by tuning the statistics to your chemical matter and predicting against your own target library annotations with SEAware™ Designer.
About SeaChange Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
- SeaChange develops chemoinformatic and statistical methods to uncover links between drug molecules and the biological targets responsible for disease and adverse effects.
- Our focus is software development, sales and support to pharmaceutical clients and finding new uses for known drugs
SeaChange was founded in 2009 by John Irwin, Michael Keiser, and Brian Shoichet at UCSF. Commercial development began in 2010 with Nicholas Hodge, who brings an extensive background in drug discovery and small-company building. The company continues to be supported by government and private grants, paid project and technology access contracts with pharmaceutical companies, and, recently, by software sales. Our Director of Operations is Nicole Norton, and our lead software developer is Michael Mysinger. The company is located in the Mission Bay region of San Francisco, within walking distance to the UCSF campus.
Our emphasis is on improving and disseminating cheminformatic technologies supported by sales, consulting projects, and government grants. We thereby also increase our understanding of client needs and typical uses, enabling simpler and more powerful software in future releases. SeaChange also maintains an internal research program that applies SEA to the known pharmacopeia with the objective of identifying known drugs with unexpected and beneficial activity as well as commercial potential.
References
1. Keiser and Roth, et al. Nat Biotechnol, 2007 (2):197-206
2. Keiser et al., Nature, 2009, 462: 173-181
3. Laggner et al., Nat Chem Biol, 2011 18;8(2):144-6
4. Lounkine and Keiser et al., Nature, 2012 486: 361–367
5. Keiser, Irwin, and Shoichet, Biochemistry, 2010 49(48): 10267-10726
