Pharmaceutical research

Platform licensing is the deepest tier in the Scoville Splice licensing stack: the entire design platform, white-labeled, deployed inside the licensee's security perimeter.

The licensee

A pain-research institute at a top ten biomedical university. The team works on non-opioid analgesic development, with a focus on the TRPV1 ion channel — the receptor capsaicin binds. They needed reliable, ultra-high-purity capsaicinoid preparations in defined five-capsaicinoid ratios for cell-based and animal assays.

Why Platform

A sector or genome license would ship cultivars, not the design stack. This team needed to iterate: new blend ratios, new structural analogues, new Pun1 variants from ESM2 scores. Platform licensing gives them the full tooling to run that loop in-house, under their own data-handling and IP controls.

The scope

The complete Scoville Splice software stack — transcriptomics pipelines, FBA solver, ESM2 scoring harness, CRISPR guide designer, and construct assembler — deployed as a white-labeled private cloud under the institution's brand. The deal grants a perpetual research-only license to the design stack plus a modest fee for ongoing engineering support.

The deal

An eight-figure upfront fee, annual maintenance in the mid six figures, and reach-through rights on any analgesic lead that cites the platform as a design tool. The institution retains full ownership of its research output; Scoville Splice retains ownership of the platform, with the right to continue licensing it to non-overlapping fields.

The build

Deployment ran six months end to end. The platform shipped as a dedicated Kubernetes cluster inside the institution's cloud environment, with federated identity, audit logging, and no outbound data pathways to our servers. Our engineering team ran a six-week embedded engagement to train research staff; thereafter, the platform runs autonomously with quarterly check-ins.

The outcome

Within the first year the institute identified three structural analogues of capsaicin with substantially altered TRPV1 agonism kinetics, two of which are now in medicinal-chemistry campaigns at the university's drug-discovery center. The design loop that used to take six months of outsourced synthesis now runs in two weeks.

See the licensing page for the full tier structure.