News Archive

1-Oct-2008 | Approval of EuroTransBio-project: Virtual Proteins BV, Lead Pharma Holding BV and Silicos are pleased to announce the approval of their collaborative EuroTransbio project entitled: New drug discovery platform combining in silico screening, 3D visualization and human heart cell validation (3Dheartscreen).
This EuroTransbio funding enhances the set up of a new drug discovery platform that integrates the proprietary technologies of the individual companies. The effectiveness of this platform in reducing lead discovery time and costs will be demonstrated on a heart failure target. The project has a budget of 2.6 million € and a duration of 2.8 years.
More information on the project and inquiries about the commercial use of the platform can be found at www.3dheartscreen.com.
5-Jul-2008 | Silicos launches new website.: Silicos announces the update of both the layout and the content of its website. After the initial technology development phase, Silicos is now ready to take the next steps along its path to becoming a valuable partner in drug discovery and design. As such, the redesigned site is more in line with the increased focus of Silicos on the application of its technology in both fee-for-service work and internal drug discovery projects. Therefore a new part of the website is especially dedicated to the internal drug discovery projects. Under the discovery section, information will be given about the status of Silicos' discovery pipeline.
May-2008 | Movetis and Silicos start collaboration.: Movetis and Silicos entered into a collaboration based on the potential of Silicos' technology for building predictive models. The goal of the project is to train a specific model, using the Spectrophores™ technology, for the prediction of the steady state blood plasma ratio for chemical entities.
Spring-2008 | Silicos expands its team.: To support its continuous growth, Silicos has strengthened its team with two modelers and one biologist. Both modelers, Matthias Mohr and Sandro Boland, have industrial experience in drug design and modeling. Their expertise will be used in both internal drug discovery projects and in specific fee-for-service projects.
Furthermore, as Silicos plans to bring its internal projects further in the discovery pipeline, a small screening facility will be set up to support the lead optimization. To this end Sofie Ignoul, a biologist, was hired to initiate the small laboratory. In the initial phase this will be in close collaboration with BioMed from the University of Hasselt.
Apr-2008 | Silicos publishes Pharao application.: Silicos has published the results of the implementation and retrospective testing of its pharmacophore-based tool, Pharao in Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modeling. Pharao is a pharmacophore-based scoring method that was developed to act as a virtual screening tool to retrieve molecules from different compound libraries and to perform pharmacophore-based clustering. The method is flexible so that it can also be used to guide the search for new molecules in de novo design algorithms or in other computer-assisted applications within the field of drug discovery. Pharao is an acronym for Pharmacophore Alignment and Optimization.
Jan-2008 | In Silico Biosciences and Silicos start collaboration: In Silico Biosciences has engaged Silicos in a multi-target virtual screening experiment to search for small molecule compounds that show desired activities against a panel of undisclosed targets. Silicos will apply its Spectrophores™ technology to build reliable virtual screening models for each of the targets and combine the models to find compounds with the expected activity profile.
Jan-2008 | UCB and Silicos start collaboration: UCB and Silicos entered into a collaboration to evaluate the potential of Silicos' technology for building predictive models. The goal of the project is to train specific models of which the predictive qualities can be assessed in UCB's early-phase drug discovery projects.
20-June-2007 | TiGenix and Silicos team up.: TiGenix and Silicos have entered into a research collaboration focussing on the in silico analysis for the identification of small molecules to modulate the activity of an undisclosed target and associated pathway for the treatment of osteo-arthritis.
27-March-2007 | Silicos raises EUR 1.7 million in first round private placement: Silicos NV has successfully completed a first round private placement of more than EUR 1.7 million. This capital increase was realized by the existing institutional shareholders, Allegro Invesment Fund (AIF), Software Holding and Finance (SHF), and Limburgse Reconversie Maatschappij (LRM) and two additional seed capital investors, Gemma Frisius Fund (GFF) and Vlaams Innovatiefonds (vinnof).
The investment will be used to support the internal growth of Silicos' new drug discovery projects. Since its incubation in 2005, Silicos has successfully implemented and evaluated its Spectrophore™ technology in several collaboration with partners from industry and academia (see collaborations). In the mean time, Silicos has also succeeded in deploying its multi-target, de novo drug discovery platform, Cosmos™, in several internal programs in the search for new drugs.
1-Mar-2007 | Silicos and CD³ start collaboration: Silicos NV and the Center for Drug Design and Discovery (CD3) of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven teamed up to start a research collaboration. The focus of CD3 is on the discovery of new small molecules that interact with and modify the function of specific innovative targets or diseases and on the hit-to-lead-development of identified hit compounds, and this in collaboration with academic research groups or spin-off companies. Silicos will apply its expertise in computational drug discovery and chemoinformatics to assist the development of these drug discovery projects of CD3.
17-Oct-2006 | Silicos releases SiMath v1.0: SiMath is Silicos' open source library and C++ API to train and evaluate predictive and classification models from real-valued data matrices. SiMath integrates several open source libraries, which all have their own interface and internal formats, into one comprehensive library. The idea of SiMath was to have flexible and consistent access to all tools needed in a typical data modeling procedure. These tools include preprocessing, feature selection, model training and evaluation.
Details about SiMath and information on how to download the source, can be found in the Technology section.
01-Oct-2006 | Silicos NV introduces Cosmos™: Cosmos™ is Silicos' proprietary platform for the de novo design of small molecules. Cosmos is an acronym for Computational Optimisation of Small Molecular Structures. It is a highly flexible in silico platform, based on a genetic algorithm for the evolution of molecules guided by one or more evaluation functions and fragment-based virtual synthesis. Evaluation functions can be ligand- and target-based. Currently, Cosmos™ has been deployed in a in-house project where several new chemical series have been identified. These compounds are now being synthesised and screened for their activity.
Check out the movie about the evolution of molecules similar in shape to cisapride. Cosmos in action (quicktime movie, 5.4Mb).
Details about Cosmos™ can be found in the Technology section.
25-Sep-2006 | Silicos NV announces the successful completion of its collaboration with reMYND NV.: Silicos NV applied its Spectrophore™ technology to identify new compounds from its in-house compound database containing more than 7 million compounds. The virtual screening experiment was based on a naive Bayesian classification model built from a set of moderate to highly active compounds previously identified by reMYND NV. After screening the entire database with the trained model, 100 compounds were selected from the top 2000, and subsequently screened by reMYND NV using their cell-based proprietary assays. Nearly 50% of the compounds showed micro- to sub-nanomolar activity.
13-Jul-2006 | Silicos NV and Vivactis NV secure government grant: Silicos N.V. and Vivactis NV have received a grant from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT) to set up a joint project to evaluate the possible synergy between the proprietary technologies of both companies within the framework of drug discovery. The resulting innovative collaboration is focused on the use of experimental thermodynamic data in the virtual screening factory to design new lead molecules for specific targets.
9-Feb-2006 | Silicos completes virtual screening database: Today Silicos completed the implementation of the in-house Spectrophore™ database for virtual screening. This database contains the computed Spectrophores™ of 7 million purchasable compounds. The availability of this database allows Silicos to offer its customers high quality virtual screening services based on its Spectrophore™ technology. All compounds inside the database are purchasable from chemistry vendors and represents as such real assets for Silicos' customers.
20-Jan-2006 | Silicos wins the 20th Tech-Art award: The Tech-Art prize is awarded to praise the originality, importance and economic potential of innovative technologies. Silicos has won the award with a project entitled In silico development of new medicines. The Tech-Art Award is organized by the VIK, the Flemish chamber of engineers.
01-Aug-2005 | Silicos secures government grant: Silicos has been awarded a research grant by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT). This government funding will support the development of Silicos' Virtual Screening Factory for the de novo design of novel and high-quality lead compounds. This platform will allow Silicos to design in silico lead molecules that are optimized against a panel of multiple targets based on its propretiary Spectrophore™ technology. The project is a research collaboration with the team of Prof. Bart De Moor at the K.U.Leuven.
Silicos, founded in June 2005, is a Belgium-based chemoinformatics biotechnology company empowering proprietary multi-target virtual screening technologies for the discovery of novel and high-quality lead compounds.
27-Jun-2005 | Private placement: Silicos increases its share capital by means of a private placement. New shareholders include SO2, LRM (Limburgse Reconversie Maatschappij), SHF (Software Holding and Finance), and some private investors.
07-Jun-2005 | Foundation: Silicos is founded by the K.U.Leuven, Dr. Ivo Vandeweerd, Dr. Wilfried Langenaeker, Dr. Gert Thijs, and Dr. Hans De Winter.