Virtual Screening in the Cloud: How Big Is Big Enough?

Virtual screening is a standard tool in Computer-Assisted Drug Design (CADD). Early in a project, it is typical to use ligand-based similarity search methods to find suitable hit molecules. However, the number of compounds which can be screened and the time required are usually limited by computational resources. We describe here a high-throughput virtual screening project using 3D similarity (FastROCS) and automated evaluation workflows on Orion, a cloud computing platform. Cloud resources make this approach fully scalable and flexible, allowing the generation and search of billions of virtual molecules, and give access to an explicit 3D virtual chemistry space not available before. We discuss the impact of the size of the search space with respect to finding novel chemical hits and the size of the required hit list, as well as computational and economical aspects of resource scaling.