Weizmann Institute Using GSI Technology’s Gemini-I® APU to Accelerate Search for Coronavirus Treatments

Faster Cheminformatics Similarity Search Outcomes with Gemini®


SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 06, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GSI Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: GSIT), a leading provider of high-performance memory solutions for the networking, telecommunications and military markets, and developer of the Gemini® Associative Processing Unit (APU), published a white paper on GSI Technology’s role in helping researchers at the Weizmann Institute in the search for COVID-19 treatments.

The white paper discusses how the Weizmann Institute is using the Gemini APU, GSI's patented in-memory processing technology, to search for active chemical structures, including compounds that can target the coronavirus. This new breed of processor performs massive parallel data processing, compute, and search directly in the memory array.

Lee-Lean Shu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GSI Technology, commented, "We are excited to be working with the Weizmann Institute to accelerate the discovery of active compounds that may prove useful in COVID-19 treatments. The Gemini-I APU is being used by researchers to identify compounds structurally similar to Remdesivir, an antiviral drug recently shown to be effective in treating severe COVID-19 patients. Compared to a CPU, our processor speeds up discovery by performing multiple versus solitary searches and reducing response times from many minutes to seconds."

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel, and The Nancy & Stephen Grand Israel National Center for Personalized Medicine (G-INCPM), which is based at and managed by the Weizmann Institute, have installed a board with the GEMINI-I APU. G-INCPM's multidisciplinary teams of scientists and clinicians, working in collaboration with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, conduct research involving genomics, protein profiling, bioinformatics, and drug discovery, translating those insights to the clinic for the benefit of human health.

A central premise of medicinal chemistry is that structurally similar molecules exhibit similar biological activities. The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is related to SARS-Cov, responsible for the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s. Remdesivir is an antiviral drug that has been shown in laboratory tests to be effective against SARS-Cov. Weizmann researchers, working with the Gemini APU and using Remdesivir as their query molecule, can perform very rapid similarity structure searches on an in-house database of 40 million compounds in their search for compounds to develop new treatments for COVID-19 patients.

Please use this link to view the Company’s publication “Introducing a “Cheminformatics Similarity Structure Search Solution” https://www.gsitechnology.com/Introducing-a-Cheminformatics-Similarity-Structure-Search-Solution.

ABOUT GSI TECHNOLOGY

Founded in 1995, GSI Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of semiconductor memory solutions. GSI’s resources are currently focused on bringing new products to market that leverage existing core strengths, including radiation-hardened memory products for extreme environments, and Gemini, the APU designed to deliver performance advantages for diverse artificial intelligence applications. GSI Technology is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and has sales offices in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  For more information, please visit www.gsitechnology.com.

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