Optibrium Appoints Director of Computational Chemistry

This success is built on a growing, global customer base for Optibrium’s flagship product StarDrop™ within the pharmaceutical industry and its adoption in other chemistry fields including agrochemicals and cosmetics. Optibrium has also recently extended its product portfolio with the introduction of Asteris™, an iPad app that enables researchers to rapidly evaluate new compound ideas when and where they want.

Reflecting the growth in the business, Optibrium has expanded its R&D and operational teams to further accelerate the rate of product innovation and support its rapidly growing customer base. This has required the company to extend its facilities by 50%, less than two years after its last office expansion.

As part of the expansion of the R&D team, Dr Peter Hunt has joined as Director of Computational Chemistry. Peter joins Optibrium from Novartis, where he was Group Leader, Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD). Peter has over 25 years of experience in drug discovery, both in industry and academic research, having previously been CADD Group Leader at Merck and the 3D Centre in Australia. Peter will provide leadership on research efforts relating to Optibrium’s software and the EU funded HeCaToS project, and his extensive drug discovery experience will further support users of Optibrium’s software platforms.

Peter commented, “I am delighted to be joining Optibrium and contributing to the development of the StarDrop product and the research into hepatic and cardiac toxicity estimation funded through the EU. Having been a user of StarDrop for several years, I have been impressed by the usability and intuitive nature of the software and I hope to build on this as we bring new features to StarDrop and Optibrium’s growing product portfolio.”

Dr Matthew Segall, Optibrium’s CEO, added “We are very happy to welcome Peter to our team, which has maintained an impressive rate of innovation over the last 5 years as we expanded our customer base worldwide. The continued growth of Optibrium is a result of the team’s hard work and together we look forward to developing new solutions that will help scientists to improve the efficiency and productivity of drug discovery.”