Sygnature today announced the appointment of Dr Michael Knaggs as Head of Computational Chemistry. Dr Simon Hirst CEO, commented, 'I welcome Mick to Sygnature, he is a great addition to our scientific team and has joined at an opportune time.' Mick has over 10 years computational chemistry experience in the pharmaceutical industry and academia in the UK and USA. He has good experience of understanding virtual screening projects (structure-based and ligand-based approaches) in a variety of targets, pharmacophore modelling, QSAR and library design; as well as protein modelling and simulation work.

Sygnature has experienced a growing interest in its computational chemistry services over the past few months, both as a stand-alone service and to support medicinal chemistry based projects. Mick is already contributing his expertise into several on-going projects and has been involved in a number of proposals for new projects involving computational chemistry.

Dr Michael Knaggs added, "I am pleased to join the company at a time when Sygnature has been experiencing an increase in interest in its discovery chemistry services and has just formed a strategic alliance with Cyprotex to provide fully integrated discovery chemistry/DMPK services. Computational chemistry forms a key component of the drug discovery process - from hit identification through virtual screening to guiding structural modifications to enhance potency and selectivity during medicinal chemistry driven optimisation. I am looking forward to working with Simon and the rest of the Sygnature team."