OpenEye Scientific, part of Cadence Molecular Sciences, develops computational molecular design and cheminformatics software and services used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic researchers in drug discovery and development. Founded in 1997 by Dr. Anthony Nicholls, the company is headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with additional offices in Boston, Cologne and Tokyo, and serves a worldwide customer base.
Its technical work spans molecular modeling, shape and electrostatics science, virtual screening, target exploration, lead discovery and optimisation, and algorithm development for computational chemistry. The flagship product, Orion, is a cloud-native large-scale compute platform built on Amazon Web Services that allows researchers to routinely model billions of compounds in-silico. The company has described it as the field's most advanced large-scale compute platform. Its broader molecular modeling and cheminformatics tools and services are engineered in the cloud to accelerate lead discovery and optimisation.
OpenEye's engineering challenges centre on faster algorithms, larger-scale in-silico modelling and cloud computing at scale on AWS. The company is led and staffed by scientists and computer programmers, and describes its ethos as “created by scientists for scientists”, with customers treated as colleagues and partners in product development.
