History

Established in 2000, DesertSci was founded by Dr Neil Taylor an experienced Computational Chemist, to remedy what he saw as a lack of usable and effective software for medicinal chemistry. Much of the existing software didn’t fully fill the needs of computational chemists in medicinal chemistry project support; it was extremely complex to use limiting it to expert users only; and technical support was poor. DesertSci was established to solve these issues by web-enabling computational chemistry and chemical informatics. More specifically, we allow scientists to access complex technologies at the click of a button by hiding sophisticated computational methodologies behind an inviting web-based interface. Customer support and responsiveness is our top priority. Our software optimises the efficiency of individual scientists working in drug discovery; facilitates the sharing of expertise within a research team and improves the dissemination of computational and informational resources.

DesertSci has grown slowly and solidly over the last eleven years. We released the first production version of Proasis2 in 2001, following extensive collaboration with AstraZeneca. We have worked closely with other major clients such as GlaxoSmithKline, F.Hoffman-La Roche and Novartis AG on improving our software and interfaces to meet industry needs. In 2005 we sought out and signed a joint venture with F.Hoffman-La Roche to develop our ground-breaking method using cooperative networks to help model tight ligand binding. This work, Scorpion, was first presented at the ACS conference in Anaheim California USA in March 2011 followed by the Gordon Conference in Vermont USA July 2011, AIMECS11, Tokyo Japan in December 2011 and in the new year in Beijing, China at PepCon2012 . A paper, entitled 'Rationalizing Tight Ligand Binding through Cooperative Interaction Networks' detailing the methods involved in developing Scorpion is published in J Chem Inf Model. 2011 Dec 9.  Other major accomplishments include the development of our new MOS clustering methods (Spinifex) in 2004 and the release of Proasis3, the significant upgrade of Proasis2 our flagship product in 2010. DesertSci continues to work closely with our clients to meet their needs and to develop innovative products to cater for the complex and sophisticated world of drug discovery.

Dr Neil Taylor received his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1990 at the age of 24. In 1991, he joined the Victorian School of Pharmacy under the supervision of Dr Mark von Itzstein and Biota. During his work with this group, the flu drug, Relenza, was published and development rights sold to Glaxo. Dr Taylor was awarded the Biota prize, Australia’s premier award for young medicinal chemists, for his molecular modelling research on the inhibition of influenza neuraminidase. As part of a skills transfer, Dr Taylor was sent on secondment to Glaxo UK in 1994. He was later employed by GlaxoWellcome in 1995 at the Stevenage UK site. During his time at GlaxoWellcome he was sent on a 6 week secondment to MSI San Diego (now Accelrys). In 1997 he was recruited by BASF Bioresearch Corporation as Head of Modelling in Worcester, Massachusetts. This research site is best known for the discovery of the drug Humera, forecast to become the world’s top selling drug in 2012. In 2000 he returned to Australia to start up Desert Scientific Software. It has been a very successful 11 years and the future looks bright – we have a strong pipeline of leading edge software products and many more new and inventive ideas to develop. This includes an exciting new ligand design tool based on the network approach, Scorpion.