Bill Gates is back with investing and from last year the Gates Foundation dumped most of their investments in Pharma, Biotech and other healthcare companies.  Now he returns,image but what is the area of investment – software, what he knows best of course.  Schrodinger LLC, is the name of the company and their websites states they are in the computational drug design business or in other words – ALGORITHMS. 

Gates Foundation Sold Off Almost All of Their Pharma, Biotech and HealthCare Investment Stocks

From the website (brief glimpse of one product)

“Desmond: High-Performance Molecular Dynamics Simulations for Biomolecular Systems

Desmond's combined speed and accuracy make possible long time scale molecular dynamics simulations, allowing users to examine events of great biological and pharmaceutical importance. Seamlessly integrated with Maestro, Desmond provides comprehensive setup, simulation, and analysis tools.”

In short as this gets pretty technical, what we are doing here is simulation and being able to obtain scientific results without getting our hands on the real thing at times.  With all the knowledge we continue to build, the job of a scientist stands to change quite a bit with doing more virtualization than actual hands on imageif the data is available to research.  I don’t think we will ever be totally simulated of course but this can certainly speed up the process of making new drugs. 

We use virtualization with computers and servers today so this is the next frontier if you will.  As this process and refining the software continues to grow they could find some big members of Pharma knocking at their door some day.

Also, one of the Gates Foundation recent efforts to help educate includes the agreement with Viacom.  If we can’t get folks to read, the foundation is “paying” for educational spots and encouraging television shows to include health related educational topics.  Most foundations have to wait until time given for this purpose, but they are paying for it, big difference in putting the effort forward and being pro-active to help reach the couch potatoes of the US.

Remember this meeting last year while we on the subject:

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Oprah, Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, Jr. and more – Billionaire’s Summit Meeting Held in New York

I did post a while back too about a robot that was developing its own drugs too, so who knows exactly where we go from here.

Adam – The Robot Scientist Designing It’s own Experiments

There’s a video of “Adam” at the link above so add more software to Adam and he can go to town.  BD 

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has made a small investment in a pharmaceutical-software maker, in a bid to reinvigorate a quest to use computers to revolutionize drug development.

The investment follows a familiar script for Mr. Gates: Merge software with increasingly cheaper and powerful computers to remake industries. Still, it's a vision that for decades has eluded a host of start-ups and the broader pharmaceutical industry.

Bill Gates Takes Stake in Creating New Drugs - WSJ.com

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