Simulations Plus Brand Guidelines: GastroPlus, Lancaster Roots & an Altaris Buyout

A Lancaster start and a flagship called GastroPlus.

Simulations Plus was incorporated in Lancaster, California in July 1996, according to the company’s corporate timeline. English Wikipedia gives the same year and town and names Walter Woltosz as founder. The company says it set out to help pharmaceutical scientists understand and predict how drugs behave, using modelling and simulation, and its name describes that work plainly.

The product that defined it came two years later. In July 1998, the timeline records, the company released GastroPlus, which it calls its flagship physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling and simulation software. The company says GastroPlus is used to plan first-in-human dosing, to study food effects and formulations, and to assess drug-drug interaction risk, and that regulators increasingly expect such models in submissions.

Simulations Plus listed its shares in 1999, the company says, under the symbol SLP, which it kept for the rest of its time as a public company. Its second major program, ADMET Predictor, reached version 1.0 in January 2005, renamed from an earlier tool called QMPRPlus; the company describes it as a machine-learning platform that predicts the properties of molecules from their structure. DDDPlus, a simulation of laboratory dissolution experiments for formulation scientists, followed in February 2005, and MembranePlus in October 2014. Version 10 of ADMET Predictor, marketed as APX, followed in September 2020, and GastroPlus X in May 2024. English Wikipedia sums up the business as absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity modelling software, sold not only to drug makers but also to the industrial chemicals, cosmetics, food-ingredient and herbicide industries.

Cognigen, DILIsym, Lixoft and Pro-ficiency.

From 2014 the company grew by buying specialists. Cognigen, a provider of clinical trial data analysis and consulting, became a wholly owned subsidiary in September 2014, according to both the company timeline and English Wikipedia. DILIsym, a modelling group that simulates drug-induced liver injury and whose first software version dates from January 2012, followed as a wholly owned subsidiary, the company says, and kept its own name as a product line.

In April 2020 the company added Lixoft, developer of the Monolix software for population modelling, whose version 1.0 had appeared in October 2011; Monolix now appears in the range as MonolixSuite. Shawn O’Connor became chief executive in June 2018, the company says. Later press releases on its site announce the purchase of Immunetrics in June 2023, which the company said would expand its immunology and oncology work, and of Pro-ficiency in June 2024. The Triangle Business Journal described Pro-ficiency in April 2025 as a Raleigh firm providing training and compliance tools for clinical trial investigators, and said the purchase extended Simulations Plus from early discovery to clinical research.

The same 2025 report recorded a change of base. The Triangle Business Journal wrote on 9 April 2025 that Simulations Plus had moved its headquarters from southern California to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, while leaving four offices in California, New York, Pennsylvania and Raleigh; the company linked the closures to its remote-work culture and plans to reduce office space. The paper noted that the company also kept an office in Paris.

How life-sciences software presents itself.

Life-sciences software is sold to scientists, clinicians, regulators and procurement teams at once, and the way these companies present themselves reflects that mixed audience. Their websites and brochures tend to show clean dashboards on laptops and tablets, molecule renderings and data charts, and people in lab coats or at clinic desks looking at screens. The product, in other words, is usually shown as an interface rather than an object.

The colour schemes follow the same logic. Many of these brands set one or two bright product colours against a lot of white space, so that charts, buttons and status labels stand out, and they use plain sans-serif type that stays legible in dense tables. Product families are often split into named “clouds,” “suites” or “platforms,” each with its own sub-brand, so a single company can carry dozens of product names under one mark.

Much of the selling happens in person. The sector gathers at trade conferences such as the DIA Global Annual Meeting, which brings together people working on drug development and regulation; Bio-IT World, which focuses on data and computing in life-sciences research; and SLAS, the laboratory-automation and screening society’s conference. Larger vendors also run their own customer summits, with keynote stages, product launches and user sessions; Medidata, for example, says its NEXT conference grew out of a user group for its Rave software.

Ownership matters too: several of the companies in this round have changed hands, and some have been bought by larger groups while keeping their own names. The guides in this round set out who founded each company, who owns it now and what it makes, and they mark clearly which statements rest only on the company’s own word.

A public company taken private.

Simulations Plus is no longer a listed company. In June 2026, Pharmaceutical Technology reported that it had signed a definitive agreement to be bought by affiliates of Altaris, a healthcare investment firm, and that Altaris planned to combine it with Chemical Computing Group, a molecular design software company already in its portfolio. On 6 October 2026, in a release distributed by Business Wire, Simulations Plus announced that the acquisition had been completed: the company became privately held, its shares stopped trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, and, the release said, it would continue to operate under its own name and brand within the combined business. Its headquarters stays in Research Triangle Park.

The current range, as listed on the company’s site, runs from GastroPlus, MonolixSuite, ADMET Predictor and DILIsym to the Thales and Pro-ficiency lines, alongside consulting, regulatory strategy and training services. The company describes its work as model-informed drug development, bridging machine learning, PBPK, quantitative systems pharmacology and population modelling, and says its technology is licensed by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical and consumer goods companies and by regulatory agencies. The company also points to its work with regulators, saying it has received more than fifteen FDA grants, and to a 2018 result in which its S+pKa method, built into ADMET Predictor, won the SAMPL6 pKa prediction challenge. Its corporate site marks the thirtieth anniversary with a timeline of papers, grants and releases.

The name is two plain English words, which the company shortens to S+ in its own materials.

For a design guide, Simulations Plus shows how a descriptive name and a family of descriptive product names can carry a company through thirty years, a change of state and a change of owner. Compare Certara, another company built around pharmacokinetic modelling, and Schrödinger, which models drugs at the level of molecules. For this guide we use a pine green, a model blue and a curve amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Simulations Plus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.