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Prescience Insilico: Rethinking India's Potential Drug Discovery

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Sudip Roy, Founder

Sudip Roy

Founder

The fast changing economic, trade and intellectual property scenario, nationally and internationally poses many challenges including the challenge of becoming leaders and competitors globally. This necessitates a shift in the approach of pharmaceutical industry to move away from manufacturing only known drugs through innovative process routes to discovering and commercialising new molecules. The accumulated knowledge of traditional medicinal system and large bio diversity of our country offer a great advantage to drug industry. However, at present, most of the Indian drug firms, due to their small size compared to international operators, are not in a position to invest in a viable new drug development programme drug development being a risky, resource intensive & time consuming process. At the same time several Indian academic institutions and national laboratories have established impressive infrastructure and developed excellent expertise in selected areas of drug development.

Sudip Roy, an industry veteran, brings in 20 years of experience in high performance computing devising solutions for the science domain like computational material science, computational chemistry and computational biology etc. Sudip obtained a PhD from University of Saarland in Germany. Having worked in Germany, Sudip came back to India in 2009. In India, he served as a scientist at the CSIR affiliated National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. Sudip moved to Bangalore after having spent six years in Pune, and joined the industry with Shell. Over the years, he switched companies taking charge of important departments. While working at Amazon Web Services, Sudip led their high performance computing and quantum computing. In a stint in Delhi, Sudip also worked for a healthcare startup that developed chemotherapy and immuno therapy drugs for cancer.

In 2019, Sudip earned Shevin Chris fellowship from the UK Government, through FCO (Foreign Common wealth Organization).

Jayant Kumar Singh is currently a professor in the chemical engineering department at IIT Kanpur for last 15-16 years. Jayant also has a PhD from University of Sunny Buffalo, in computational science and computer science. Jayant returned to India after his PhD and worked with industry giants like general motors, before beginning his journey in academia. Sudip and Jayant have experience working together for 10 years. Soon, the duo realized the need for a science based company that builds software for scientific computing. Thus, Prescience Insilico was born in 2019.

Prescience Insilico addresses the most overlooked problem of the pharmaceutical industry. The drug development cycle usually takes around 12-15 years. While the US has developed traditional software to reduce the time cycle, India still hasn't developed a software that can essentially reduce the drug designing or drug development cycle by a considerable margin. Prescience Insilico is a team of team of exciting young and experienced research scientists and computational experts of varied backgrounds who are working together with academia and industry to develop next generation scientific products and tools for material and drug discovery.
PRinS3 Platform
Prescience Insilico has developed a software solution platform(PRinS3) to host multiple applications. This novel solution platform is designed to provide all modules for developing application(APPs)for targeted solutions.

Currently this platform facilitates drug design applications. Prescience Insilico is working on a set of applications for materials. Some of these are listed in the pipeline section and potential industry and users could ask for early access. The firm also develops customized APPs on request from its customers.

Prescience Insilico addresses the most overlooked problem of the pharmaceutical industry


The platform (PRinS3) for Scientific Applications is a novel platform developed to host applications (APPs) to perform and provide solutions in healthcare, energy and materials domains. The team of experts at Prescience Insilico has also developed APPs that are hosted on the platform for providing solutions to the industries working in materials, chemicals energy and pharmaceutical domains. Prescience hosts three applications for drug designing PRinChem for Chem informatics, PRinBIO for Bio-informatics and PRinMTMLESS for Multi Target Multi Ligand Enhanced Sampling screening. The PRinS3 provides all the necessary technologies to run these APPs seamlessly. The platform consists of three techs, DataConnector, Modules, and Visualization tools.

Exceptional Services
Prescience service portfolio includes Drug Discovery, Materials Discovery, Chemical and Energy.

Drug Discovery
For Drug discovery segment, Prescience works on computational biology, computer and machine learning aided drug designing and computational drug formulations. Prescience team of experts use their own drug discovery platform and advanced screening methodologies to screen 1000s of drug candidate for specific disease/targets. The firm's computational multi target miltilig and screening methodology is based on three stage process, starting from docking to full atomistic molecular dynamics and finally meta dynamics based free energy of binding calculations. Prescience also offers solutions and services in Structure Property Predictions and help in designing new therapeutics.

Materials Discovery
Prescience provides computational solutions and services to design and predict properties of materials with high accuracy even before they are synthesized. The company leverages the advances in machine learning (ML), high throughput calculations in cloud to design smart materials for cutting edge applications.

Chemical
Polymers surfactants, solvents, ionic liquids, etc. are widely used for various applications like paints, adhesive, rubber, thermoplastics, fast moving consumer goods, and so on. Prescience is having dedicated team working on these chemicals(complex fluids) to design better products.

Energy
Computer simulations are significant and economical that can reduce the time for innovating new materials for application in energy. Computer simulations also help in reducing the cost of the innovation, risk/ safely of research and development and could provide mechanistic insights.

Future of Drug Discovery on the Back of New Age Technologies
In the years to come, Prescience In silico intends to further expand its reach by providing more IP through solutions to the industry and at the same time establish an external R&D team to help the firm's internal R&D team with IP work.

Besides, multicloud and quantum computing will be the key features that Prescience Insilico intends to add to the software features. Most importantly, the firm is going the extra mile to introduce Virtual Reality to the platform thereby enabling drug developers to visualize the drug interactions with the protein DNA or RNA. This itself can significantly boost research to exceptional outcomes. Prescience Insilico will essentially work towards building a platform than can enable users to leverage, and innovate new drug discoveries through this platform.