Cadence Expands into Molecular Simulation with Acquisition of OpenEye Scientific

This morning, Cadence announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held OpenEye Scientific Software Inc, a leading provider of computational molecular modeling and simulation software being increasingly used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies for drug discovery. OpenEye's products are used by 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally—including Pfizer and AstraZeneca—as well as numerous biotechnology companies and academic institutions. 

OpenEye Scientific is an industry leader in computational molecular design and has pioneered physics-based approaches and the cloud-native Orion software platform to accelerate advances in human health. The acquisition will enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to benefit from more robust drug discovery solutions that combine OpenEye’s innovative molecular modeling and simulation software solutions for drug discovery with Cadence’s algorithmic and solver expertise, efficient large data management infrastructure, and leading AI/ML and cloud solutions.

Of course, this is another step in broadening Cadence's computational software to domains beyond our roots in IC design. We internally developed electronic system analysis tools involving finite element analysis (FEA). We acquired NUMECA and PointWise in the domain of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Just two weeks ago we acquired Future Facilities, a leader in thermal modeling of datacenters and digital twins. Today, we branch out into life sciences with computational molecular modeling.

I can't really do better than to quote Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's CEO, from his keynote at the recent Design Automation Conference (DAC):

Computational software is CS + Math. That’s what EDA is, what I think EDA is, that’s my background and EDA has done that for a long time, for 40 or 50 years. I think that the value of computational software, CS + Math, has been applied to semiconductors and that is still going strong. But I believe it can be applied to a lot of other things. So it’s truly exciting to be in this field. The last ten years has been very big in software, everyone knows that, especially in social media and other kinds of software in silicon valley. But I believe that in the next 10 to 20 years even that software will become computational, indeed it is already becoming with analysis of data.

Orion, OpenEye's market-leading cloud-native SaaS platform, is growing rapidly as pharmaceutical and biotechnology users embrace its flexibility and scalability to perform complex molecular calculations on a large scale. Orion is designed to:

• Run ligand-based or structure-based virtual screenings, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, free energy predictions, quantum mechanics calculations, sequence analysis, and more from just a web browser
• Perform ultra-fast 2D and 3D search of more than 5 billion stereoenumerated commercially available molecules and 40 billion conformers
• Integrate third-party or in-house tools
• Let you collaborate with colleagues without file transfers and formatting
• Leverage pre-built workflows or customize your own
• Leverage the computational resources of the cloud

Technological advancements, coupled with the rising demand for new drugs across a range of diseases, are driving increased demand for computational drug design. The growing utilization of computational techniques in drug discovery for pharmacology, chemical synthesis, and drug screening to study the 3D structure of molecules, are major factors fostering the growth of the global biosimulation market, which has an estimated TAM of $2B and is predicted to have a CAGR of approximately 15% over the next five years. Biosimulations are a critical tool for pharmaceutical research as they provide atomic-level insight into molecular interactions, and there’s a growing demand for the high-performance simulation of larger biological systems over longer time scales.

OpenEye Scientific was founded in 1997. It is headquartered in Santa Fe, NM, with offices in Boston, Cologne (Köln), and Tokyo ( 東京).

Learn More

See the OpenEye Scientific website.

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