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.

化学合成的外包是现代制药研发范式的支柱，特别是在项目的早期发现阶段。这意味着制药研发团队的组成发生了根本性的变化，在过去，每个项目都会有一个庞大的化学家团队支持，现在有一两个高级化学家担任分子设计师，他们由远程团队（通常在印度，中国或其他低成本地区）支持，负责合成设计的分子。Cresset有一套现有的软件工具，旨在帮助计算化学家和药物化学家设计和合成分子，特别是帮助理解分子的3D特性及其与靶蛋白的相互作用;然而，我们相信，随着新的范式的出现，对新工具的需求越来越大，以促进项目沟通并加快新分子的交付。我们打算在这一领域进行市场研究，以验证我们的信念，即基于云平台并提供3D设计能力的新软件应用程序，加上2D结构输入和表示，将满足设计分子的高级科学家，制造分子的外包合成团队，以及项目团队的其他成员，他们依赖于以轻松和及时的方式访问结构和相关信息。我们打算进一步验证安全的公共云应用程序和内部托管的私有云应用程序的市场机会，这将更吸引大型制药客户（前者吸引学术界和小型公司）。我们相信，这种工具在全球范围内有着巨大的市场机会，但我们强烈需要用更广泛的市场数据来验证我们的概念，而不是从我们目前的客户联系中获得。

Outsourcing of chemical synthesis is the backbone of the modern paradigm forpharmaceutical R&D, particularly in the early discovery phase of a project. This has meant aradical change in terms of the composition of Pharma R&D teams, where in the past therewould have been a large team of chemists supporting each project, there is now one or twosenior 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 designedmolecules. Cresset have an existing suite of software tools aimed at helping bothcomputational and medicinal chemists with the design and synthesis of molecules, particularlyhelping with the understanding of the 3D properties of the molecules and their interactionswith target proteins; however it is our belief that with the new paradigm there is an increasingneed for new tools to facilitate project communication and speed up the delivery of newmolecules. We intend to carry out market research in this area to validate our belief that a newsoftware application, based on a cloud platform and delivering 3D design capability, plus 2Dstructural entry and representation, will meet the needs of the senior scientists designing themolecules, the outsource synthesis teams making the molecules, and the other members of theproject team who rely on getting access to the structures and related information in an easyand timely manner. We intend to further validate the market opportunity for both a securepublic cloud application and an internally hosted private cloud application, which wouldappeal more to large Pharma customers (the former appealing to academics and smallercompanies). 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 ableto access from our current customer contacts.