TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tokyo Institute of Technology ("Tokyo Tech"; Tokyo, Japan; President: Yoshinao Mishima) and Astellas Pharma Inc. ("Astellas")(TOKYO:4503)(President and CEO: Yoshihiko Hatanaka) today announced that they have signed a joint research agreement for drug discovery research utilizing Tokyo Tech's TSUBAME2.0 supercomputer to efficiently discover candidates for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases ("NTDs") caused by dengue virus.
NTDs, prevalent mainly among the poor in tropical areas of developing countries, are infectious diseases spread by parasites or bacteria. As it is estimated that approximately one billion people are affected with NTDs worldwide, NTDs are a serious healthcare issue that is being addressed on a global scale. Among them, diseases caused by dengue virus, such as dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever are with high unmet medical needs for treatment and development of new therapeutic drugs. There is no existing drug to treat dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever in the market as well as under development, and the effectiveness of some vaccines to prevent dengue virus currently under development is unclear at this time.
Under the collaborative agreement, Tokyo Tech which has cutting-edge
computation technique, and Astellas will cooperate on an IT
drug-discovery research project for the treatment of NTDs caused by
dengue virus. The research will be conducted in collaboration with a
research group led by Professor Yutaka Akiyama, Dr.Eng., at the
Department of Computer Science in the Graduate School of Information
Science and Engineering, with a proven track record in the field of
bioinformatics research, and Associate Professor Masakazu Sekijima,
Ph.D., at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, with a
proven track record in the field of computational chemistry research.
The
collaborative research is largely divided into two phases. In the first
step, data mining of public information such as patents and published
articles will be carried out to obtain useful and effective knowledge
about the drug discovery for the treatments for diseases caused by
dengue virus. In the second step, in-silico screening will be
performed to identify compounds which are predicted to have anti-dengue
virus activities. Tokyo Tech boasts Japan's first petaflop class
supercomputer TSUBAME2.0, and will assume responsibility for data mining
and for in-silico screening calculations of commercially
available compounds. Astellas will be responsible for preparing input
data for data mining, selecting, and listing of hit compounds to be
evaluated based on the in-silico screening calculations, thereby
implementing efficient drug discovery in a short time period.
Tokyo Tech and Astellas will work together to accelerate the discovery
of new drugs for patients suffering from dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic
fever in the world, through their collaborative research aiming to
contribute to improve global public health problems.
Also, Tokyo
Tech and Astellas signed a joint research agreement for drug discovery
research utilizing Tokyo Tech's TSUBAME2.0 supercomputer to efficiently
discover candidates for the treatment of NTDs caused by protozoan
parasites on July 30, 2012.
Ends
Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech)
Tokyo Institute
of Technology established as Tokyo Technical School in 1881, became
Tokyo Technical High School in 1929, and then acquired the university
status in 1929. Tokyo Tech is the largest national university of science
and technology in Japan with a 130 year history. The creative education
at Tokyo Tech has resulted in fostering a great number of excellent
alumni, including Dr. Hideki Shirakawa, Nobel laureate in chemistry, and
in sending them to science fields and Japanese major companies which
have helped support Japan's economy. Tokyo Tech has three schools
(Science, Engineering, and Bioscience and Biotechnology), six graduate
schools (Science and Engineering, Bioscience and Biotechnology,
Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering,
Information Science and Engineering, Decision Science and Technology and
Innovation Management), five research laboratories under the Integrated
Research Institute, and numerous other Research and Service Centers. For
further information on Tokyo Tech please see the university website at www.titech.ac.jp/english/index.html.
Astellas Pharma Inc. (Astellas)
Astellas' raison d'etre is
to contribute toward improving the health of people around the world
through the provision of innovative and reliable pharmaceutical
products. Astellas has approximately 17,000 employees worldwide. The
organization is committed to becoming a global category leader in
Urology, Immunology (including Transplantation) and Infectious Diseases,
Oncology, Neuroscience and DM Complications and Kidney Diseases. For
more information on Astellas Pharma Inc., please visit the company
website at http://www.astellas.com/en/
TSUBAME2.0 supercomputer
TSUBAME2.0 is a production
supercomputer operated by Global Scientific Information and Computing
Center (GSIC), Tokyo Institute of Technology in corporation with our
industrial partners, including NEC, HP, NVIDIA, Microsoft among others.
Since Fall 2010, it has been one of the fastest and greenest
supercomputers in the world, boasting 2.4 PFlops peak performance by
aggressive GPU acceleration, which allows scientists to enjoy
significantly faster, larger computing than ever. This is the second
instantiation of our TSUBAME-series supercomputers with the first being,
as you might guess, TSUBAME1. It also employed various cutting-edge HPC
acceleration technologies, such as ClearSpeed and NVIDIA GPUs, where we
had learned many important technical lessons that eventually played a
crucial role in designing and constructing our latest supercomputer.
Compared to its predecessor, TSUBAME2, while keeping its power
consumption nearly the same as before, achieves 30x performance boost by
inheriting and further enhancing the successful architectural designs.