Simulations Plus, Inc. (AMEX: SLP), a leading provider of simulation and modeling software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, announced that it has released a major upgrade to its best-in-class discovery cheminformatics ClassPharmer software for pharmaceutical research and development.

Dr. David Miller, team leader for discovery cheminformatics for Simulations Plus, said: “In this upgrade, we’ve included a number of features requested by our users around the world, as well as extensions to the molecule design capability we released in the spring with the R-Table Exploder. Molecule design can now go beyond the chemistry represented in an R-Table to include a series of chemical reactions that can be used to create new molecules from scratch, or to create variations of existing molecules through a set of specific chemical reactions specified by the user. Combined with our ADMET Predictorâ„¢ software, this provides chemists with an ultra high throughput method for creating and screening new lead molecules.”

Walt Woltosz, chairman and chief executive officer for Simulations Plus, added: “We’ve been showing how ClassPharmer and ADMET Predictor can be used together to speed up discovery chemistry. Last week, I co-chaired a scientific session and gave a presentation to a very large group of scientists from around the world at the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics conference in Sendai, Japan. We’ve had a number of requests for copies of the presentation slides since then. We’ve continued to show these programs at pharmaceutical industry sites in Japan this week with excellent response, and we’ll also be giving two seminars this week, one in Tokyo and one in Osaka, at which multiple companies will attend. We’re excited about the response we’ve been getting from chemists for this new capability in drug design. The combination of ADMET Predictor and ClassPharmer is quite powerful, and each program should help to promote additional licenses of the other.”