Nimbus Therapeutics focuses on early-stage drug discovery and development with the goal of creating life-changing medicines. The company’s chemists design small-molecule compounds that target proteins known to drive disease.

Until recently, computational medicinal chemists like Nimbus’s Dr. Lewis Whitehead did not have a good way to share their molecular structure designs with the chemists and biologists on their teams.

Then, at the 2018 American Chemical Society conference, he discovered Nanome — developers of a cutting-edge virtual reality solution for molecular modeling available on an Oculus VR headset.

The Nanome VR solution ingests structural data and simulation algorithms from computational chemists like Dr. Whitehead and turns them into 3D visualizations in VR. This allows scientists to physically interact with molecular structures, moving and rotating them to see details that are often missed using traditional 2D software and other simulations. “We create an immersive environment where chemists can build small molecules in the context of a protein’s binding site,” says Sam Hessenauer, Nanome CTO. “It’s like being able to build a key from inside a lock.”

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