Innovation Convention: results

Do not extinguish the generation 

Irik Imamutdinov, Galina Kostina, Dan Medovnikov, Tigran Oganesyan

(With abbreviations: descriptions of projects unrelated to biomedicine can be read in the full text of the article on the website of the Expert magazine.)

On the ninth-tenth of December, the first annual Russian Youth Innovation Convention was held at the congress center of the World Trade Center (Moscow). This event could be recorded by the state PR department (the convention was attended by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko, Minister of Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy Vitaly Mutko, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, President of the Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute" Evgeny Velikhov, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the company "Basic Element" Oleg Deripaska and others), but even if this is the case, the event turned out to be not entirely trivial. More than a thousand young innovators who participated in the competition of innovative projects defended their projects in several rounds before a rather tough expert council, and three of them rightfully received the Vladimir Zvorykin Prize. The expertise of the projects was carried out by specialists of the Assistance Fund, the Expert Innovation Bureau, the MSU Science Park and other organizations.

Vyacheslav Muravyev, the head of the project "Development of a miniature semiconductor generator and a terahertz radiation detector" from the Institute of Solid State Physics near Moscow (Chernogolovka), received the award in the nomination "Best Invention".

Hermes Chilov, the head of the project "Software package for the development of new medicines", developed by employees and graduate students of the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, won in the nomination "Innovative project".

The best innovative manager was Nikolay Dobrovolsky with the Parallels Desktop for Mac project, the world's first product that allowed Windows to run efficiently on Macintosh computers.

The Zvorykin Prize was also awarded to: in the nomination "International recognition" — Pavel Troshin (research area: organic synthesis, materials science, organic electronics, energy conversion). In the nomination "Information support of innovative economy" — the magazine "Popular mechanics". Each winner received a cash prize of 1 million rubles.

Hermes is preparing a revolutionYoung innovator Hermes Chilov received the award for the best innovative project.

He created the company "Molecular Technologies", which developed a program for modeling the interaction of potential drugs with target proteins. It is known that pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time and money searching for the best candidates for new medicines. Molecular modeling is one of the methods they use along with more traditional ones, for example, screening of known low—molecular compounds, which is much more expensive than modeling. The new method has not yet proven its effectiveness, so it causes some skepticism. But Hermes Chilov intends to defeat this skepticism. Already, the Moltech program is more successful than that of global competitors, it is being tested in the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

Hermes Chilov was born in Vologda 30 years ago. His first hobby in early childhood, as far as he remembers, was astronomy. Mom bought popular science books for her son, and later sent him to the best city school. There Hermes fell in love with chemistry — thanks to the teacher, Valentina Alekseevna Komarova. In her classes and in her laboratory, he felt the magic of substance transformations. Komarova's students, as a rule, easily entered the chemical faculty, even at Moscow State University. Hermes also considered himself a doctor and went to Moscow State University for the spring preliminary exams, which he successfully passed. But they didn't take him to study. It turned out that the guy hadn't even graduated from school yet, the eleventh grade remained. In general, they said, come back in a year. Hermes spent the eleventh grade at the Vologda State Natural-Mathematical Lyceum and keenly regretted that he had studied there for only a year. "It was a happy time. Brilliant teachers. A fantastic atmosphere of science, like the Strugatskys," recalls Hermes. A wonderful physicist from the lyceum is now a professor in Germany, a wonderful mathematician from time to time is a professor in England. But the most beloved was the chemist Alexander Zosimovich Lisitsyn, a well-known Russian scientist who worked for many years at the N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Anyone who studied with Alexander Zosimovich already really felt like a scientist,— says Hermes. — The guys performed original works, the results of which were published in serious scientific publications of the country." In the same year, Hermes actively participated in many Olympiads: in the city — in chemistry, physics, mathematics, where he won prizes, in the Russian — in chemistry, where he became the second. As the winner of the Russian Olympiad, he could enter the chemical faculty without exams.

Once at Moscow State University, Hermes did not feel in this temple of science the magic that accompanied him during his studies at the lyceum. Unfortunately for him, he was unlucky to meet such stars there as the teachers at school and lyceum were and who could even more captivate him with certain ideas. Some courses captured him, but not for long. Hermes studied with his characteristic perseverance, realizing that the time allotted for study should be spent with maximum benefit — to get the basic knowledge that will help in further activities. He wanted to be a scientist. To do this, he entered and graduated from graduate school, defended his PhD thesis in 2003 and remained working at the A. N. Belozersky Research Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology at the Department of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics of Moscow State University. In 2005, he realized what he would do.

This project was preceded by several events: participation in two innovative competitions and a meeting with future partners. He was invited to the "Formula for Success" competition held by the MSU Science Park when he was in graduate school. And he even won something with a project concerning the enzymatic production of optically active compounds. But the main thing was not in the project, but in the competition itself. "They taught innovative entrepreneurship there, and it really fascinated me," says Hermes. "As a result, after that I attended two courses on this topic in Plekhanov Academy". And then I participated with the same project in the BIT — business-innovative technologies competition. It is these contests, and two more trips to business schools in Sweden and Canada, according to Chilov, taught him to look at things soberly: innovations should not just be needed by the world, but also be in demand by someone very specific. He realized that the prospects for obtaining active compounds were very vague with the project, and began to think about a more commercial niche. And he came up with: no problems with test tubes, enzymes, laboratories, searching for money for all this, searching for obscure consumers — only smart heads and computers were needed for his topic.

"After all, I have always loved these mysterious interactions of molecules, since childhood: if you draw a diagram of the interaction of all molecules in a cell, you will get a picture of a "black square". And until you learn to understand the interaction of all points in this darkness, many problems will not be solved," says Hermes. However, this time he chose to simulate the interactions of proteins in the cell associated with various diseases with low—molecular compounds - potential medicinal substances. The choice, in fact, was ambiguous. Several dozen groups in the world are engaged in the creation of such programs, but they have not achieved significant success, and therefore the main consumer of such a product — pharmaceutical companies — has a very skeptical attitude towards it. Yes, they use the best practices of drag designers, but as an additional method and when there are funds for it. Basically, they rely on traditional chemical screening. "However, a company can find a connection experimentally in a week and a million dollars, and with the help of modeling — in the same week, or maybe less, and several thousand dollars," Hermes emphasizes. But only if there is a program that will guarantee the result one hundred percent."

So Hermes chose both a scientific challenge and, if successful, a revolution in the market for finding the optimal interaction of molecules. His partners in this project showed up even earlier — he met the guys while supervising term papers and a diploma. Now there are four of them in the company: besides him, Oleg Stroganov, Fyodor Novikov and Viktor Stroylov work there. And the company "Molecular Technologies" was founded in 2007. Hermes admits that the revolution will not take place tomorrow, but for some reason the results already achieved allow them to look to the future with optimism. From the very beginning, the young scientists decided that they would go the other way. Looking through a mountain of information about competitors, they were somewhat surprised to find that there were significant holes. "There are teams where there are more mathematicians, others have more chemists," says Hermes Chilov, "and they are kind of blinded, many of them are groups with narrow expertise. We consider ourselves multidisciplinary specialists, and that is why we were able to create a unique algorithm that significantly better finds the optimal interaction of a protein with a low-molecular compound."

Hermes explains: in order to find this optimal interaction, it is necessary to explore a huge space, sorting through millions of possible configurations. The dumbest algorithm would just scan all this space and spend the lion's share of time on those areas where it won't find anything good. Meanwhile, the algorithm of "Molecular Technologies" simply "cuts off" these areas, and deals only with those in which it can quickly localize the best point for interaction. And fundamental knowledge of chemistry, physics and biology helps to find these interesting areas. Algorithms from other companies do a lot of extra work and are therefore less efficient. In addition, the method of calculating the energy of interaction of molecules is of great importance, and Moltech has also succeeded in this. The tests carried out, the results of which were published in a top scientific journal, indicate that the Moltech program is significantly ahead in accuracy of well-known commercial analogues.

Now scientists continue to improve the program. "We want to solve another difficult problem," says Hermes. "None of the programs yet takes into account the influence of water molecules in this interaction of protein and compounds. It is believed that it is absolutely impossible to fully take into account this influence. But we have ideas, and I think that in six months we will reach a new level."

But already today, the Moltech program, which is called Lead Finder, is being tested in such world pharmaceutical giants as Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson and Johnson", "Hoffman la Roche" and others. To communicate with them, Moltech has created a branch in Canada, which is led by an experienced specialist. According to Hermes Chilov, the preliminary comments are inspiring. Negotiations are also underway with other representatives of Big pharma. In Russia, the company already had a successful experience of interaction with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, for which it fulfilled an order to clarify the mechanism of action of a new drug, which was then confirmed experimentally. She also interacted with a number of companies engaged in the search for drug candidates and the synthesis of potentially active compounds. Potential customers, manufacturers of biologically active additives are in the field of view.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru15.12.2008