We are pleased to announce that ERCO Pharma AB has successfully applied for the EuroHPC JU Development call and got access to the EuroHPC JU system VEGA in Slovenia.

ERCO Pharma is a commercially focused, emerging pharmaceutical services and development company – built on 20 years of research at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and strongly committed to increasing the understanding of the human skin barrier and pioneering the use of advanced computer simulation to generate more information from experimental transdermal data, creating a mechanistic description of the permeation process.

ERCO Pharma's access is connected with their project "Skin permeability". A molecular level understanding of skin permeation may rationalize and streamline product development and improve quality and control of transdermal and topical drug delivery systems. The company has developed an atomistic model of the main barrier in human skin. That model is used to predict drug permeability using molecular dynamics simulations (using GROMACS). The effect of permeation enhancers in pharmaceutical formulations is also predicted. This will help improve topical drug delivery.

ERCO Pharma has been awarded 1 920 000 CPU Core hours and 384 000 GPU Core hours on the VEGA system.