Strategic partnership between Black Diamond and OpenEye aims to accelerate drug discovery efforts through cloud-based molecular dynamics technology
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., and SANTA FE, N.M. – September 21, 2021 – Black Diamond Therapeutics, a precision oncology medicine company pioneering the discovery and development of MasterKey therapies, and OpenEye Scientific, a leader in computational molecular design, today announced that they are entering into a strategic partnership incorporating OpenEye’s Orion® molecular design platform into Black Diamond’s proprietary Mutation-Allostery-Pharmacology (MAP) drug discovery engine to advance Black Diamond’s efforts to develop MasterKey inhibitor cancer therapies.
OpenEye’s Orion Software-as-a-Service platform will enable Black Diamond to perform rapid simulations and analysis of protein motion through Orion’s powerful combination of a high-performance compute facility, scientific development environment, and browser-based analysis and collaboration tools. Black Diamond and OpenEye will collaborate to co-develop enhanced-sampling capabilities designed to deliver information on an accelerated time scale. With the increased capability to model large and complex systems, Black Diamond will enhance its ability to discover mutant selective MasterKey therapies that target families of oncogenic mutations.
“Our proprietary MAP drug discovery engine combines computational and experimental techniques to identify, validate, and aggregate oncogenic mutations, rendering them actionable by a single MasterKey inhibitor,” said David M. Epstein, PhD, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Black Diamond Therapeutics. “Complementing our expertise in cancer genomics, protein function and medicinal chemistry, we believe our work with OpenEye will enable the expansion of Black Diamond’s therapeutic pipeline by enhancing a molecular understanding of intact, full-length oncoproteins activated by a diverse array of driver mutations.”
OpenEye’s Orion molecular design platform integrated with Amazon Web Services’ Cloud environment allows Black Diamond to pursue scalable and parallel analyses of the conformational states of families of mutant oncogenes. The deployment of these large-scale perturbations provides Black Diamond with detailed structural and dynamic information on target proteins to guide drug discovery efforts. The arrangement between OpenEye and Black Diamond involves an upfront payment and potential downstream economics resulting from select Black Diamond products for OpenEye.
“We are beginning to see the marriage of computation and genomics not just through sequence analysis, but at the structural level,” said Anthony Nicholls, CEO and Founder of OpenEye Scientific. “This shift is being hastened by the Cloud and its democratization of large-scale computation. We’re very proud to be able to work with Black Diamond to combine molecular simulation on our cloud platform, Orion, with their MAP drug discovery engine to accelerate their search for novel cancer therapeutics.”