The partnership between the Michel group, Cresset and OpenBioSim Community Interest Company has been recognised by the Society of Chemical Industry for their work to transform computational drug discovery. EaStCHEM School of Chemistry's Professor Julien Michel attended the SCI Innovation and Sustainability Awards Dinner at the Palace of Westminster on Wednesday May 21st 2025 as a shortlisted finalist for the ‘Innovation Enabled by Partnership’ award for his collaborative work with the software company Cresset. SCI's Innovation Award recognises and celebrates scientific innovation in industry that has been enabled as a direct result of collaborative partnerships. Cresset is leading the digital revolution in molecule design and cross-team communication, combining cutting-edge science with AI/ML to enable customers to discover new compounds faster and more efficiently. Built from 20 years of computational chemistry innovation, Cresset provide an unrivalled platform for discovery organizations to achieve scientific success.This enduring academia-industry partnership was initiated in 2018 with funding from InnovateUK and has led to the launch of the commercial product FlareTM FEP (Free Energy Perturbation) by Cresset. FlareTMFEP has given drug discovery scientist communities access to advanced computational chemistry workflows for predicting drug binding affinity predictions.1 Cresset's Flare (TM) FEP software Julien Michel (R) and collaborator Mark Mackey of Cresset attending the SCI Innovation and Sustainability Awards Dinner at the Palace of Westminster. By making FEP methodologies accessible to a broad spectrum of users this partnership is accelerating the pace of drug development programs and reducing the time to market for new patient treatments. The success of this partnership led to the University of Edinburgh spinning out its first ever social enterprise, OpenBioSim Community Interest Company, to sustain further this academia-industry partnership. OpenBioSim provides software maintenance and engineering services to facilitate adoption of academic research software by industry. My research group’s partnership with Cresset exemplifies the mutual benefits of two-way knowledge exchange between industry and academia. Cresset’s focus on developing innovative molecular modelling software has, in turn, spurred new connections through OpenBioSim, bringing together diverse academic and industry research communities with a shared interest in open-source research software. Julien Michel Professor of Biomolecular Simulation The longstanding collaboration between Cresset and the Michel group, and more recently OpenBioSim, has been instrumental in the growth of Cresset to become one of the world’s leading computational chemistry software providers. We are grateful for the initial funding from Innovate UK which allowed the initial stages of the collaboration to flourish, and believe that our partnership with the University of Edinburgh is an excellent example of the benefits of close collaboration between academics and industrial researchers. Mark Mackey Chief Scientific Officer, Cresset 1) ‘’Assessment of Binding Affinity via Alchemical Free Energy Calculations’’Kuhn, M ; Firth-Clark, S. ; Tosco, P ; Mey, A. S. J. S. ; Mackey, M. ; Michel, J.J. Chem. Inf Model. ,60 , 6, 3120–3130, 2020 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.0c00165 Publication date 23 May, 2025
