Market research to validate the commercial potential for a novel cloud-based application to enable medicinal chemists to rationally design new compounds for pharmaceutical R&D.

Outsourcing of chemical synthesis is the backbone of the modern paradigm for
pharmaceutical R&D, particularly in the early discovery phase of a project. This has meant a
radical change in terms of the composition of Pharma R&D teams, where in the past there
would have been a large team of chemists supporting each project, there is now one or two
senior chemists who function as molecule designers, who are backed up by remote teams
(often in India, China or other low-cost locations) responsible for the synthesis of the designed
molecules. Cresset have an existing suite of software tools aimed at helping both
computational and medicinal chemists with the design and synthesis of molecules, particularly
helping with the understanding of the 3D properties of the molecules and their interactions
with target proteins; however it is our belief that with the new paradigm there is an increasing
need for new tools to facilitate project communication and speed up the delivery of new
molecules. We intend to carry out market research in this area to validate our belief that a new
software application, based on a cloud platform and delivering 3D design capability, plus 2D
structural entry and representation, will meet the needs of the senior scientists designing the
molecules, the outsource synthesis teams making the molecules, and the other members of the
project team who rely on getting access to the structures and related information in an easy
and timely manner. We intend to further validate the market opportunity for both a secure
public cloud application and an internally hosted private cloud application, which would
appeal more to large Pharma customers (the former appealing to academics and smaller
companies). We believe there is a significant worldwide market opportunity for such a tool,
but we strongly need to validate our concept with broader market data than we have been able
to access from our current customer contacts.