BioSimulytics, a UCD spinoff developing a new software platform, has won the 2019 UCD Startup of the Year award.

The company, which has emerged form UCD’s School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, is developing a software platform to bring greater speed, certainty and product data quality to a critical part of the drug development process.

Essentially, drug molecules, which are complex compounds, can have hundreds of stable structures, all with different properties which can effect efficacy and toxicity and all of which can change under the influence of thermodynamic conditions. 

A huge problem in developing drugs is to find and reproduce the precise and stable crystal structure of a new drug — out of tens of thousands of compounds, perhaps just one may become a new drug suitable for patient use.

BioSimulytics will replace what is essentially time-consuming trial and error with a software package that it says requires only “the basic 2-D structure of a compound to accurately predict the detailed profiles of all its polymorphic forms, ranked by the most stable, with full certainty achieved within weeks, resulting in a 20-50% time saving on the current experimentation method”.

In Association with

The company was declared overall winner of the 2019 UCD VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme, which aims to support the creation and launch of sustainable and profitable new startups, and is supported with cash from Enterprise Ireland and by NovaUCD.

Apart from the gongs the company, founded by Professor Niall English, Dr Christian Burnham, Dr Pralok Samanta and commercial lead Peter Doyle, receives a €32,000 prize to help it on its way, €10,000 from sponsor AIB, a professional service package worth €10,000 from Bryan Maguire Business Consulting and Deloitte, and incubation space at NovaUCD worth €12,000.

Niall English commented “We are initially seeking to raise €400,000 in investment to build our core team, to rapidly grow our business with leading pharmaceutical, biotech and CDMO companies.

“BioSimulytics is the result of collaborative research at UCD which has been funded to date by an Enterprise Ireland commercialisation fund, and I would like to thank Enterprise Ireland for their funding and support. 

“I would also like to acknowledge the great encouragement provided by NovaUCD, the VentureLaunch facilitators, and specifically all of the VentureLaunch participants through their invaluable feedback and support during the programme.”

The accelerator programme consists of seven workshops delivered over a two-month period from October to November. Each session consists of a mix of taught content and interactive workshops delivered by external experts, as well as talks from entrepreneurs.

Photo: Prof. Niall English (left) and Peter Doyle. (Pic: Nick Bradshaw)