Editor’s Cor­ner of Fierce BioTech IT .com 5/16/11

“My visit to Nim­bus, Bill Gates’ bet on vir­tual drug discovery

The nerve cen­ter of Nim­bus Dis­cov­ery, a largely vir­tual biotech start-up, resides in the offices of Atlas Ven­ture in Cam­bridge, MA. Bruce Booth, an Atlas part­ner and chair­man of the small com­pany, recently to talked to me at the firm’s offices about how Nim­bus is mak­ing use of computer-aided drug dis­cov­ery soft­ware from Schrödinger to advance a pipeline of poten­tial treat­ments for can­cer, obe­sity other conditions.

Microsoft ($MSFT) chair­man Bill Gates was announced as one of Nim­bus’ seed investors in March, rais­ing the pro­file of the young firm and shed­ding light on its unique rela­tion­ship with Schrödinger, in which Gates invested last year through his Cas­cade Invest­ment group. Nim­bus hasn’t dis­closed how much it has brought from Gates, Atlas and its other seed investors, yet more details could be in the off­ing; the com­pany is plan­ning a Series A round of fund­ing in the near future.

Schrödinger, a global provider of chem­istry sim­u­la­tion soft­ware for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, is a major share­holder in Nim­bus. Ramy Farid, Schrödinger’s pres­i­dent, co-founded Nim­bus with Atlas’ Booth in 2009 and sits on its board, the chair­man says. The start-up has spe­cial access to Schrödinger’s soft­ware, sup­port from the 21-year-old company’s com­pu­ta­tional chem­istry experts and busi­ness exper­tise from Atlas.

While it’s too early to say with Nim­bus’ drugs will suc­ceed in clin­i­cal tri­als, the upstart has been able to show how the use of new soft­ware for under­stand­ing dis­ease pro­teins and other tools have helped speed its drug dis­cov­ery efforts, accord­ing to Booth. Read the full arti­cle »”