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Cadence (CDNS) Teams Up With Antiviral Discovery Consortium

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Cadence Design Systems, Inc (CDNS - Free Report) is teaming up with the Antiviral Platform (“ASAP”) Discovery Consortium to develop antivirals to prevent pandemics in the future. CDNS will offer its OpenEye molecular design software to drive the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven structure-enabled ASAP platform.

The goal of the AI-driven ASAP Discovery Consortium is to fast-track structure-based open-science antiviral drug discovery and deliver oral antivirals for pandemics equitably and affordably across the globe.

The ASAP Discovery Consortium is an Antiviral Drug Discovery U19 Center for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern. It is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, through a $68 million funding as part of the Antiviral Program for Pandemics.

The ASAP Discovery Consortium boasts partners like the Stanford University School of Medicine, Diamond Light Source, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Medchemica, Mount Sinai and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. It also has a worldwide network of scientists and industry collaborators.

OpenEye’s software will help scientists develop therapeutics for less-researched infectious diseases. OpenEye’s various applications, toolkits and Orion platform will assist computational chemists in creating a strong antiviral drug discovery pipeline by leveraging structural biology, AI, machine learning (“ML”) technology and computational chemistry.

Cadence acquired OpenEye Scientific Software for about $500 million in cash in September 2022. With OpenEye’s acquisition, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies will be able to work on robust drug discovery solutions by combining OpenEye’s molecular modeling and simulation software solutions with Cadence’s algorithmic and solver expertise, data management infrastructure, as well as innovative AI/ML and cloud solutions.

CDNS currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). In the past year, the stock has gained 59.7% compared with the Zacks sub-industry’s growth of 46.5%.

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