Optibrium Scales Drug Discovery Solution to up to 10,000 Concurrent Users Using Amazon AppStream 2.0

Optibrium’s comprehensive in silico platform improves the speed, efficiency, and productivity of the small molecule discovery process and supports a worldwide customer base, including leading pharma, biotech, agrochemical, and flavoring companies and not-for-profit and academic groups. With in silico modeling, Optibrium helps customers virtually simulate thousands of potential compound candidates so that suitable ones can be investigated further.StarDrop launched as a self-hosted desktop application, but Optibrium wanted to simplify deployment and reduce the total cost of ownership for customers by virtualizing a full desktop experience of the application from a web browser. “Amazon AppStream 2.0 gave us the most flexibility and best performance, which made it the right choice for us,” says Ian Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Optibrium. Optibrium developed and released StarDrop in the cloud within 6 months. “The speed to market was incredibly quick for us,” says Smith.

StarDrop in the cloud dynamically scales on AWS to support a range of customers, from academic organizations with 1 scientist to pharmaceutical companies with 500 researchers. The solution supports up to 10,000 concurrent users with the same performance and user experience as the desktop application. “Using AWS, we can make StarDrop available to customers 24/7/365,” says Smith. The company achieves high availability using AWS best practices. To protect its customers’ sensitive data, Optibrium uses AWS security tools for data encryption, continuous threat monitoring, distributed denial of service protection, and traffic filtering.Optibrium’s customers save time and money because they no longer need to manage and maintain IT infrastructure and software installations for drug discovery. “Customers can start accessing StarDrop from a web browser in a matter of hours instead of needing months to deploy it,” says Smith. Because StarDrop in the cloud is virtualized, Optibrium can update and deliver new features directly to users. Over time, Optibrium will no longer need to support multiple versions of StarDrop in production, which streamlines the development lifecycle for faster feature innovation.

Optibrium continues to innovate StarDrop on AWS and is working on new cross-organization collaboration features for securely sharing compound designs, visualizations, and modeling data. “Our goal is to offer a class-leading experience and flexibility for all our customers, using AWS to modernize our existing capabilities and offer new products,” says Smith. “For example, we’ve recently launched a second Appstream-based platform called Semeta, which is a metabolite prediction application. There are plans for more, too!”