SOFTWARE
Blaze™ for ligand-based virtual screening
Advanced ligand-based virtual screening software to dramatically increase your wet screening hit rate at a fraction of the cost
Rapidly explore chemical databases containing millions of compounds
Virtual screening software platform, Blaze™ uses the 3D electrostatics and shape of a defined ligand to rapidly search large chemical collections for molecules with similar properties. By adjusting the level of influence played by each of these factors, users can achieve a high diversity of hits, with hit rates as high as 30%.
With a virtual screen of 10 million structures taking just a few hours, Blaze enables huge time and cost savings. It reduces the need to purchase chemical compounds and load them into lab apparatus. Users can simply hand over the best quality leads to the lab, making early-stage drug development more cost-effective, and reducing the environmental impact caused by wasted chemicals.
Use Blaze to find alternatives to typically problematic drug types. Reduce side effects, counteract resistance, and improve short-term efficacy by replacing steroids with non-steroids. Counteract poor oral bioavailability, rapid degradation, and the need for frequent dosing, all commonly associated with peptide drugs, by replacing them with non-peptides.
- Increase the diversity of your project’s leads and back-ups
- Jump into new areas of chemical space
- Find novel lead-like hits from known actives
- Replace peptides with non-peptides or steroids with non-steroids
- Achieve substantial improvements in the properties of your hits
- Fast search algorithm - a virtual screen of 10 million structures takes just a few hours
Blaze Cloud
The prospect of running a virtual screen of 10 million compounds may sound like a significant computational expense. Thanks to our virtual screening web server, Blaze Cloud, we can offer a fast and flexible solution to those lacking internal computing power.
Available on a per-project basis, millions of commercially available compounds can be searched using a secure, encrypted web browser session.
Flexible deployment
- Install Blaze on your CPU or GPU Linux clusters
- Deploy our Amazon-ready version of Blaze
- Access Blaze Cloud on Cresset hardware via a secure web portal
- All commands are accessible through a web-based GUI, or thorugh a RESTful web service API
- Blaze virtual screens can also be accessed through workflow tools such as KNIME or Pipeline Pilot
- Engage Cresset Discovery to carry out a virtual screening project
Licensing Blaze
Testimonials from Blaze users
We sought the scientific expertise within the Cresset Discovery Services team to utilize their novel field and shape-based virtual screening methods in Blaze™, and their proprietary Electrostatic Complementarity™ technique to help identify a backup series for our target effectively and efficiently. Ultimately we identified 9 novel chemotypes that were clearly distinct to those arising from docking and pharmacophore virtual screening approaches, which was an exciting outcome for us.
Dr Zara Sands, Head of CADD and Informatics, Confo Therapeutics, Belgium
I've personally experienced the versatility of Blaze™ in identifying promising compounds for novel targets and optimizing leads for ongoing projects. The software's remarkable accuracy, cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, and adaptability make it an indispensable tool for accelerating drug discovery efforts. I wholeheartedly endorse Blaze to all researchers and pharma companies looking to maximize their ligand-based virtual screening capabilities and drive remarkable advancements in drug discovery.
Drug Discovery CRO
Flare gives us an excellent assessment of the potential binding of hits. We use it to triage hits from Blaze and Forge experiments in the absence of 3D-QSAR, narrowing them down to an affordable subset of the most promising hits.
Dr Graeme Stevenson, Cancer Therapeutics CRC, Australia
This is a very important and exciting project for my team so thank you for your good work. The incredibly high hit rate from the Blaze compound list is intriguing.
Anon
Blaze identifies chemical hits in a database of some 40 million commercially available compounds that match the 3-dimensional electrostatic and steric character of my query. Because Blaze is agnostic to chemical structure, the hits are structurally diverse from the query. In addition to identifying hits for screening against my target, we gain valuable insights on potentially attainable binding interactions as well as chemically tractable ideas for compound design.
Anon
Blaze was successfully employed for a Protein-Protein Interaction’s confidential project, looking for hits against a novel target where no known inhibitors are yet found. After the first round of Virtual Screening campaign, the team at Cresset was able to identify a nanomolar compound that is currently under further development to become a lead.
Anon
As a proficient user of Blaze™ for ligand-based virtual screening, I am thrilled to share the immense potential this Cloud-based solution offers in rapidly exploring chemical databases containing millions of compounds. With its state-of-the-art algorithms and extensive molecular structure database, Blaze has elevated drug discovery to new heights
Anon