Certara, the leading global technology-enabled drug development and drug safety consultancy, announced that its Muse molecular design workflow for the identification and optimisation of lead drug candidates now has virtual synthetic chemistry capabilities.

Known as Muse Invent, this new product will enable researchers to create drug candidates with novel structures, scaffolds, or side-chains that meet multiple design objectives and are synthetically accessible. It will also describe the necessary synthesis pathway to create them.

“Muse has always been a popular product because it permits ‘outside of the box’ chemistry thinking; it allows customers to generate new chemical ideas without being limited to molecules found in existing databases and product catalogs,” said Certara chief technology officer Jonathan Feldmann. “But when customers became enamored with the new molecules they created in Muse, they wanted to know how to make them in the lab.”Certara responded promptly to this customer feedback and began to develop Muse Invent.

Brian Masek, a product manager at Certara, added, “Muse Invent is one of the first products to build a bridge between the traditional worlds of molecular design and synthetic chemistry. In the past, design software would suggest and score ideas, while synthetic chemistry tools would help researchers to look up reactions; Muse Invent combines both design and synthesis capabilities in a single product. It enables researchers to generate drug design ideas that satisfy all their criteria for success.”

Certara will launch Muse Invent in the United States at the American Chemical Society Fall  National Meeting & Exposition in San Francisco from Aug. 10-14. Its European launch will take place at the 20th EuroQSAR symposium in St. Petersburg, Russia from August 31-September 4.

Certara is the leading technology-enabled drug development and drug safety consultancy. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable data-driven decisions, leading to more precisely designed trials with a reduced risk of failure and improved subject safety.