The products created by Structural Bioinformatics Inc. speed up lead discovery time for SBI customers by providing structural data and analysis for important drug targets. Protein structures, not gene sequences, are required for structure-based drug discovery and design. Protein structure determines biological function and directly describes pharmacophore shape. The 3-D protein pharmacophore structural information generated from sequence data by SBI has proven utility in generating small molecule, non-peptide leads for a diverse range of proteins. These algorithms have made possible a highly prolific approach to lead discovery, yielding numerous compounds from diverse chemical classes rapidly, thereby providing multiple starting points for optimization and the potential for broad composition-of-matter patent coverage. More than a dozen chemically distinct families of cytokine, growth factor, bioactive peptide and monoclonal antibody-derived lead compounds have already been generated using the type of protein structural information generated by SBI scientists.

SBI's resulting protein structural information is being accumulated into large databases that can be immediately and directly used in a variety of structure-based drug discovery technologies, including structure-directed combinatorial or molecular diversity screening and computational screening using molecular similarity or computational docking algorithms. Potential applications also exist for generation of "chemical knockouts" to speed gene analysis. Of perhaps greatest importance to pharmaceutical companies faced with a flood of genomics data, SBI's computational approach--unlike physical approaches such as high-throughput screening, X-ray crystallography and NMR--is truly scalable at a level that offers the promise of actually keeping pace with the ever-accelerating rate of gene sequence data output.

SBI has developed web-based technologies that integrate genomics data and tools for rational drug design, allowing the analysis of gene sequences, protein structures, and combinatorial libraries. These web-based tools provide a seamless integration of pharmaceutically valuable gene/protein sequences with structure-based drug design tools, and can be used, for example, to take sequences to 3D-templates to virtual screens in order to find non-peptide leads, or to find drug leads and functional probes for novel disease genes rapidly. The web interface acts as a front-end to all of the databases produced by SBI and provides a central link to the SBI databases as well as a host of public domain databases and bioinformatics sites.