CEO's end of year message 2014

As we near the end of the year it is great to look back at how we have helped our customers deliver concrete results in 2014. Commercial R&D is highly competitive and customer confidentiality is of primary importance to our customers, and therefore also to us. This makes it all the more rewarding to be able to share these recent announcements:

• Monsanto presents Tioxazafen which was discovered with the help of Cresset’s software
• University of Newcastle collaboration with Cresset meets research target

2014 has seen a continued strengthening of Cresset’s staff. Dr Ritesh Chauhan (European Account Manager), Dr Paolo Tosco (Computational Chemistry Developer) and Dr Giovanna Tedesco (Product Manager) are recent recruits who are based in our European headquarters in Cambridge, UK. We have also acquired new office space in Cambridge, MA, USA in order to better serve our North American customers.

Left to right: Paolo Tosco, Ritesh Chauhan, Giovanna Tedesco.

At the same time, there has been an increased focus on the increasingly important Asian markets in China, Japan and India. We appointed Shanghai-based Cloud Scientific as our primary distributor for the China market. In November we hosted the International Symposium on Compound Design Technologies, a successful one-day meeting in Shanghai, along with our partners Optibrium and Cloud Scientific. I was very pleased with the enthusiastic response to our software from Chinese industry and academia. This symposium was a repeat of a similarly successful event held in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, in March.

Left to right: Andrea, Hu, Qi, Jack (Cloud Scientific), Prof Jun Xu (Sun Yat-sen University) and Rob (Cresset) at the ISCDT held at the British Consular offices in Shanghai.

In Japan, Cresset also participated in the Bio-Japan Conference and Exhibition as part of the EU-Japan Bio Cluster Mission, both to raise the profile of Cresset and identify new opportunities for the company. Working with our distributor, Hulinks, we were pleased to announce the addition of Nagoya University to our growing list of Japanese customers.

There has been a continued focus on India, with the country seeing growth in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agrochemical and academic research. The Centre for Chemical Biology & Therapeutics (CCBT) at Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, recently took a 3-year license agreement for Forge and Spark. Dr Kavitha Bharatham, who leads the computational chemistry team in CCBT, commented that, “The support I have received from Cresset staff has been excellent, and I am very pleased to introduce their computational tools to CCBT for our lead optimization and identification projects. I am confident that we will achieve our goals.”

Our North American and European user group meetings this year were a great chance to hear from customers old and new. If you missed these meetings you can see the presentations we have permission to publish here. The 2015 user meeting dates are June 3rd in Cambridge, MA, USA and June 18th – 19th in Cambridge, UK. I encourage everyone connected with Cresset to attend one of these informative meetings. They are a great opportunity to share ideas and innovations, receive hands on software training and to network with new contacts from industry and academia.

On behalf of the Cresset team, I wish you all the very best for a successful 2015. I look forward to meeting you at our user meetings or one of our other forthcoming events, and I hope to be able to share many more successes with Cresset’s customers around the world.

Dr Robert Scoffin
CEO