by Kirsty Barnes, in-Pharma Technologist.com via Agnet Feb. 1/06

Bayer CropScience will use Cresset BioMolecular Discovery’s molecular field technology to identify novel early-stage active compounds to develop into new agrochemicals for the crop science industry.

This venture is the first major application of UK drug discovery technology company Cresset's molecular field technology in the agrochemical arena.

Cresset's FieldScreen software is a virtual screening technology that allows users to search through in-house and commercially available compound libraries to select compounds with diverse structures but the same biological function.

What used to be a laborious process for companies in early stage-drug development can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time with Cresset's FieldScreen - the first validated field analysis software for drug candidate selection.

FieldScreen's hit selection is uniquely accomplished by an analysis of the molecular field around the compound and not the molecular structure itself, allowing it to find completely novel hits from screening just a few hundred compounds rather than hundreds of thousands.

"Cresset's FieldScreen technique is complementary to our existing software tools in computational chemistry and we feel confident that this approach provides another step towards further improving our early phase research activities," said Michael Schindler, senior scientist at Bayer CropScience.