Cyclica Inc. is awarded access to IBM's Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to repurpose FDA approved drugs

Cyclica's co-founder, Mickaël Krzeminski, will lead the project entitled Multi-scale characterization of protein-drug interaction networks for the FDA's Rare Disease Repurposing Database (RDRD) using chemical systems biology and molecular dynamics methodologies. Such multi-scale repurposing studies have never been conducted using the proprietary methods developed by Cyclica Inc.

This project will use next generation technology with a Big Data platform that includes biologically relevant proteomics data and is expected to identify drug repurposing opportunities that would otherwise be missed. A secondary objective of the project is to create enhanced, information rich systems pharmacology databases.

Intellectual property that arises during the course of the project will be jointly owned by the parties involved. Repurposed compounds with "high therapeutic potential" identified and characterized in the study will be patented and then licensed or sold for development by pharmaceutical companies.

The SOSCIP programme will provide resources to accommodate data generated by the project, which is estimated to reach hundreds of Terabytes. Such resources include access to Blue Gene/Q, recently announced as the fastest supercomputer in Canada, a computing platform designed for massive parallel processing and grand challenge computational science to enable rapid prototyping and modeling. They also include a platform that combines Cloud computing with advanced analytics software to support a variety of Big Data applications, including rapid prototyping and experimental modelling. Potential application areas include: event-driven near real time decision support, high volume data analysis and/or modelling, disaster response systems, and health care treatment and outcome analysis.