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Publish Date : 23-Mar-2013

Tokyo Institute of Technology and Astellas Pharma Inc. today announced that they have signed a joint research agreement for drug discovery research utilizing Tokyo Tech\'s TSUBAME2.0 supercomputer to efficiently discover candidates for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases (\"NTDs\") caused by dengue virus.

NTDs, prevalent mainly among the poor in tropical areas of developing countries, are infectious diseases spread by parasites or bacteria. As it is estimated that approximately one billion people are affected with NTDs worldwide, NTDs are a serious healthcare issue that is being addressed on a global scale. Among them, diseases caused by dengue virus, such as dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever are with high unmet medical needs for treatment and development of new therapeutic drugs. There is no existing drug to treat dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever in the market as well as under development, and the effectiveness of some vaccines to prevent dengue virus currently under development is unclear at this time.

Under the collaborative agreement, Tokyo Tech which has cutting-edge computation technique, and Astellas will cooperate on an IT drug-discovery research project for the treatment of NTDs caused by dengue virus. The research will be conducted in collaboration with a research group led by Professor Yutaka Akiyama, Dr.Eng., at the Department of Computer Science in the Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, with a proven track record in the field of bioinformatics research, and Associate Professor Masakazu Sekijima, Ph.D., at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, with a proven track record in the field of computational chemistry research.

The collaborative research is largely divided into two phases. In the first step, data mining of public information such as patents and published articles will be carried out to obtain useful and effective knowledge about the drug discovery for the treatments for diseases caused by dengue virus. In the second step, in-silico screening will be performed to identify compounds which are predicted to have anti-dengue virus activities. Tokyo Tech boasts Japan\'s first petaflop class supercomputer TSUBAME2.0, and will assume responsibility for data mining and for in-silico screening calculations of commercially available compounds. Astellas will be responsible for preparing input data for data mining, selecting, and listing of hit compounds to be evaluated based on the in-silico screening calculations, thereby implementing efficient drug discovery in a short time period.

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