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Executive summary

Executive summary for Equinox Pharma

Welcome to Equinox Pharma

Equinox Pharma is a computationally-driven logic-based drug discovery company which, in partnership with pharma companies, agrochemical companies, biotechs and medicinal chemistry-based contract research organizations, uses its capability in proprietary logic-based machine learning and chemoinformatics (INDDEx™), based on the patented SV-ILP method, to undertake drug discovery programmes for our clients.

Equinox Pharma uses its proprietary logic-based machine-learning technique INDDEx™ (Investigational Novel Drug Discovery by Example) to learn from a training dataset of active and inactive molecules from a screening programme to generate quantitative logic-based rules. These rules are in the form of pairwise distances between fragments of substructure, which provide vital chemical insight into the stereochemical and structural requirements for biological activity. We then undertake ligand-based virtual screening using the logic-based rules to search databases of commercially available, or proprietary, libraries of small molecules to identify potentially active molecules.

Chemical insight: logic-based drug discovery

Chemical insight: in-silico logic-based drug discovery learns (for example) that a molecule is active if it has fragments of a pyrazole ring and a benzene ring that are 8.2 ± 1.0 Angstroms apart.

In contrast to other database screening tools, INDDEx™ is unique in the approach used such that the new structures identified, and predicted to be active, can bear little resemblance to the training data molecules. In this way INDDEx™ is a leading tool in scaffold-hopping technology.

Equinox’s customers provide, in confidence, training datasets which are mined to identify new structural “hits”. These hits are further, iteratively optimised using INDDEx™ technology to generate optimised leads for pre-clinical development.

Conceptional image of molecular structure inside gelcaps

Equinox Pharma was set up to commercialise the world leading research of three senior academics from Imperial College London : Professors Stephen Muggleton, Mike Sternberg, and Paul Freemont have collaborated over many years developing expertise in the applications of machine learning, chemo- and bio-informatics and protein crystallography to drug discovery.