Mesa Analytics & Computing, LLC receives a 2 year Phase II SBIR grant from the National
Science Foundation for building a Cheminformatics Virtual Classroom – Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 3, 2005
Mesa Analytics & Computing, LLC has received a $499,998 Small Business Innovative Research grant from
the National Science Foundation to build a Cheminformatics Virtual Classroom. The project combines
academic teaching and industrial software expertise to bring cheminformatics tools into university settings.
Professors at major universities (Indiana University, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona,
University of New Mexico, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia Technological Institute) will
provide design and testing input. Additionally, these academic contributors have extensive experience in the
use of cheminformatics in the pharmaceutical industry. Vendor participants include Mesa Analytics & Computing, LLC,
Accusoft, Inc., ChemAxon, Inc., eduSoft, Inc., OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc., and Sunset Molecular
Discovery, LLC. Software from vendor participants will be incorporated into the virtual classroom. Additionally,
Mesa Analytics & Computing, received a supplement for two RET (Research Experience for Teachers) stipends
for K-12 or community college teachers.
“By working within innovative projects like this, and providing all of our
software free to educators and academic researchers through our Acadedmic Package program, ChemAxon is
committed to improving chemistry education" said Ferenc Csizmadia, CEO of ChemAxon.
Dr. David Wild, adjunct Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Engineering at the University of Michigan, stated
"Cheminformatics is a growing field which will play an increasingly key part at the intersection of chemistry,
biology, genomics, and drug design. It is essential that we train students and industry professionals in the tools and
techniques of cheminformatics, and I'm thrilled that Mesa Analytics and Computing are making strides ahead in
this area."
The principal investigator for the grant, Dr. Norah MacCuish, CSO of Mesa, added, “Mesa’s goal is to provide
students with a thorough foundation in cheminformatics as well as the most recent developments in the field,
through an eLearning virtual classroom environment. Mesa and the vendors offer a terrific combination of
complementary and integrable cheminformatics software tools suitable for eLearning.”
Our research results are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation
Research (SBIR) Program under Grant No. 0450457. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.
About Mesa Analytics & Computing, LLC
Mesa was founded in 1999 to provide custom data mining solutions and software for companies with problems in
knowledge discovery. Mesa develops and applies advanced statistical learning algorithms and methods across
industrial problems as varied as cheminformatics, precision agriculture, fraud detection, or control systems. Our
commercial software products contain state-of-the-art research and production tools that cover a wide range of
early drug discovery data analysis techniques. Please visit http://www.mesaac.com.