VeraChem LLC, spun out of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI), has created scientific software to provide expert users with tools for computer-aided drug discovery and molecular design. The firm develops and markets innovative software for the analysis and design of molecules to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. VeraChem's software capabilities include protein-ligand and host-guest binding affinity prediction, fast calculation of accurate partial atomic charges for drug-like compounds, computation of energies and forces with commonly used empirical force fields, automatic generation of alternate resonance forms of drug-like compounds, conformational search with the powerful Tork distort-minimize algorithm, and automatic detection of topological and 3D molecular symmetries.