Bill Gates has invested $10 million in computational drug design company Schrödinger, Derek Lowe reports in a Nature News column. The company, which is privately owned, doesn't publicly release financial information, but Lowe says its yearly revenue is somewhere around $20 million, making Gates' contribution "substantial." Lowe says Schrödinger will most likely use the money for long-term projects, like collaborative efforts wherein industrial drug-discovery organizations test the company's products in the real world and send the results back to the programmers so they can make improvements.
Deepak Singh at Business Bytes Genes Molecules says that's a possibility, but that there is an opportunity with this investment to "take the productization of science one step further." One of the challenges of computational drug design is pushing the technology further while conducting a solid project, Singh says. With this money, Schrödinger can afford to take some risks in cutting-edge science. "I have a good feeling about this and the future of not just the company, but what impact this might have on the craft of molecular modeling and computational drug discovery over the next decade," he adds.