Simulations Plus, Inc. (NASDAQ: SLP), a leading provider of modeling and simulation software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, today announced that it has been awarded a $4.7 million, five-year contract by a major research foundation that prefers to remain anonymous, contingent on satisfactory completion of project milestones. The agreement involves expansion and further development of KIWI™, a proprietary, cloud-based software platform to support modeling and simulation activities. Together, Simulations Plus and the foundation plan to utilize the enhanced KIWI as an integral driver of the foundation’s efforts to support groundbreaking approaches to reducing the burden and accelerating progress toward eradication of underserved diseases.
KIWI leverages the extensive business process research that has been performed by the Buffalo, NY division of Simulations Plus (Cognigen Corporation), to support model-based decision making across the research and development (R&D) lifecycle. KIWI is used to efficiently organize, process, and communicate modeling and simulation results. The enhancements to KIWI that will be made during this contract effort will provide a scaffold with broad applicability to other therapeutic areas and will be available to industry and academic clients of KIWI.
Dr. Ted Grasela, president of Simulations Plus, said: “Our collective vision for this initiative is to deploy an innovative, collaborative infrastructure, incorporated into the KIWI platform, that will remove the barriers to communication amongst global team members. The platform will serve as a framework for the interdisciplinary collaboration required to develop informative disease-drug models that make optimal use of existing and emerging scientific research in underserved disease drug development. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the risks and cost of drug development and speed the delivery of new life-saving medicines.”
“We are very excited about the opportunities that arise from this project,” Grasela continued. “There is a remarkable, global community of scientists working through this foundation’s funding. This initiative provides much-needed support in terms of computer processing power and organizational and communication tools for complex modeling and simulation projects. We look forward to working with the scientists, not-for-profit organizations, and for-profit pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies who are partnering in the research areas funded by this organization.”
Walt Woltosz, chairman and chief executive officer of Simulations Plus, Inc., said: “The increasing use of modeling and simulation to support pharmaceutical R&D requires that we rethink business processes. This project demonstrates that the excellent work that Ted and our Buffalo division have performed will be instrumental in reshaping the R&D enterprise to maximize the value delivered by modeling and simulation efforts.”