Cresset BioMolecular Discovery and Bayer CropScience announce a collaboration on molecular field technology

Cresset BioMolecular Discovery Ltd (Cresset BMD), a drug discovery technology company, and Bayer CropScience, a global market and innovation leader in the agrochemicals industry, have announced today that they have entered into a collaboration to exploit Cresset’s molecular field technology for the discovery of new agrochemicals.

This venture is the first major application of Cresset’s molecular field technology in the agrochemical arena. Bayer CropScience will apply Cresset’s FieldScreen™ software to identify novel early stage active compounds to progress through their development pipeline.

Andy Vinter, Cresset’s CSO, commented: “We are delighted to be working with Bayer CropScience, to apply and develop our FieldScreen™ software and related technology to identify new chemotypes for the crop science industry. Bayer CropScience has an exceptionally experienced and innovative computational chemistry group and we are confident that this collaboration will result in pioneering advances in crop science research.”

Michael Schindler, Senior Scientist at Bayer CropScience, states: "Cresset's FieldScreen technique is complementary to our existing software tools in computational chemistry and we feel confident that this approach provides another step towards further improving our early phase research activities."

FieldScreen™ is based on Cresset’s revolutionary method of modelling compounds in terms of their molecular fields rather than their atom and bond representations which chemists are accustomed to using. If two structurally different compounds bind to the same region of a protein, their ‘outer skins' or Fields must be similar despite their structural differences. Cresset has developed technology to create and visualise accurate fields around a molecule which can be used to model binding interactions. The Field technology has been validated by several major pharmaceutical companies for virtual screening over the past year.