Pharmacelera, a company that offers both hardware and software solutions for computer-aided drug design, based in the Pier 01 building in Barcelona, has been selected by the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) as being in the top 5% of innovative companies in Spain in 2016.

Furthermore, the CDTI has awarded the company a NEOTEC grant to “accelerate the design of our solutions using molecular modelling algorithms, as well as hardware accelerators,” Pharmacelera CEO Enric Gibert explained to CataloniaBio. With this new development, the company will be able to search molecular libraries more quickly and precisely than it can with the tools currently available.

Pharmacera’s algorithms are the only ones on the market that use all relevant 3-D interaction fields to search for new compounds, which allows them to find more chemically diverse candidate molecules. The company, headed by Gibert (CEO) and Enric Herrero (CTO), currently offers three products: PharmaScreen, PharmQSAR and PharmaBox.