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As part of its mission to advance national expertise and technological innovation, EuroCC Italy actively supports the development of cutting-edge tools for research and industry. It is within this framework that Dompé farmaceutici , in collaboration with Cineca and Politecnico di Milano, has developed and continues to enhance the Exscalate platform.
With this solution, the aim is to empower the scientific community in designing new pharmaceutical strategies, offering high-performance tools and opportunities that can accelerate research and broaden therapeutic options.
Exscalate: innovation for drug development
Exscalate was created to overcome the limitations of traditional drug-discovery and development pipelines, which are often slow, costly, and marked by high attrition rates. The journey from identifying a biological target to selecting clinical candidates requires substantial resources and highly specialized expertise.
To meet these challenges, a structure-based virtual screening platform has been developed to accelerate lead identification and optimization by combining:
- advanced bioinformatics techniques
- a large and diverse chemical library
- exascale computing power
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms
These technologies allow the platform to continuously learn: algorithms rapidly validate generated hypotheses, progressively improve simulation accuracy, and anticipate potential failures, enabling more reliable decision-making throughout the process.
Key advantages
Adopting the platform delivers clear and measurable benefits:
- Significant reductions in cost, effort, and development timelines.
- Enhanced quality and precision, increasing the likelihood of clinical success through the simultaneous assessment of complex molecular systems.
- Support for new polypharmacological approaches through the modulation of multiple targets.
- Early prediction of potential failures, well before they occur in the pipeline.
- Allosteric target modulation to minimize off-target effects and reduce side effects.
- An open, collaborative ecosystem that fosters dialogue among academia, industry, and startups.
EuroCC Italy’s contribution
Within the EuroCC Italy task on “Industrial Services Development,” Dompé’s work has focused on researching and developing next-generation tools based on High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI computational models to enhance Exscalate’s capabilities. In particular, the effort has centred on the creation of ProfhEX and TCS – two tools designed to:
- accelerate drug development and repurposing
- support the design and engineering of new molecules
The overarching goal is to provide the scientific community with new therapeutic opportunities.
For more information on Exscalate, its architecture, and successful applications, click here.