Lhasa Limited publishes no price for Derek Nexus. The product pages describe what the software predicts and invite you to get in touch, and that is where the trail ends. Search for the price and you mostly find Cisco Nexus switches and border crossing cards. What a company pays for Derek, or for the Derek and Sarah pair that ICH M7 work needs, is not written anywhere public.
Except in one place. US federal agencies buy the same software, and their awards are public. Thirty two awards are written to Lhasa Limited from 2008 to 2027, about $658,000 in total, from the EPA, the FDA and the NIH. Several of them renew the same license year after year, which is the closest thing to a price list that exists.
The short answer
A Derek Nexus license for one primary site and five users cost $5,254 to $6,199 a year at the EPA from 2011 to 2017. Derek, Meteor and Sarah Nexus together for five users cost $12,418 in 2022, rising to $14,651 for the year from August 2025. The FDA's full Knowledge Suite, five products, ran about $25,400 a year on a five year term. These are government figures from a not-for-profit vendor, so read them as a floor for a commercial quote rather than a forecast.
Why Lhasa sells memberships, not just licenses
Lhasa is a not-for-profit organization. In its own words, when your organization licenses software from Lhasa, you become a member of the company with the potential to contribute to future development. The awards use exactly that language. The 2023 EPA award buys a "full membership" to Derek, Sarah and Meteor, a 2012 award pays a "Meteor limited membership fee", and a 2008 NIH award reads "one site, 5 users, full membership".
That matters for a buyer in two ways. Full and limited memberships are different price points, so ask which one a quote assumes. And members share data with Lhasa that improves the knowledge base, which is part of what the fee pays for. If your company cannot share anything, say so early, because it changes what you are buying.
How much does Derek Nexus cost for five users?
About $6,200 a year on the government record, after several years of small increases. The EPA renewed one Derek license for one primary site and five users across seven awards. The chart shows each renewal at its own amount.
EPA, Derek Nexus, 1 primary site, 5 users. Bars start at $4,800
Three increases of 2.9 percent, one of 8.3 percent, and then three straight years at $6,199. The 2.9 percent steps are identical to a tenth of a point, which looks like a fixed uplift rather than a negotiation, and the flat years show that the uplift was not applied every time. If your renewal arrives with an increase, the EPA record gives you both a typical figure and evidence that a flat renewal happens.
What does the Derek and Sarah pair cost for ICH M7?
ICH M7 asks for two complementary (Q)SAR methods to assess mutagenic impurities, one expert rule based and one statistical. Lhasa sells exactly that pair: Derek Nexus is the expert rule based system and Sarah Nexus the statistical one. Most M7 buyers therefore need both, and the closest public figure is the EPA's five user bundle of Derek, Meteor and Sarah.
| Term | Buyer | How the award describes it | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2022 to Jul 2023 | EPA | Derek Nexus, Meteor Nexus and Sarah Nexus, subscription and membership, 5 users | $12,418 |
| Aug 2023 to Aug 2024 | EPA | Derek, Sarah and Meteor 2023 full membership | $13,039 |
| Mar 2025 to Aug 2025 | EPA | Subscription for Derek Nexus, Meteor Nexus and Sarah Nexus | $13,952 |
| Aug 2025 to Aug 2026 | EPA | Subscription renewal for Derek Nexus, Meteor Nexus and Sarah Nexus | $14,651 |
| May 2018 to May 2020 | FDA | Derek, Meteor, Vitic, Sarah and Zeneth Nexus, full, two years | $83,981 |
| May 2020 to May 2025 | FDA | Lhasa Knowledge Suite Nexus, the same five products, five years | $126,975 |
| May 2025 to May 2027 | FDA | Lhasa Knowledge Suite Nexus, the same five products, two years | $52,734 |
| Jul 2026 to Sep 2027 | FDA, Office of Cosmetics and Colors | Lhasa software and licenses | $24,176 |
The EPA bundle moved $12,418, $13,039, $13,952, $14,651: up 5.0 percent, 7.0 percent, then 5.0 percent again. That is faster than the 2.9 percent steps of the 2010s, so if your quote shows about 5 percent a year, it matches what the government is paying now. The 2025 award covering March to August reads like a bridge to move the anniversary, because the full year renewal starts the day after it ends.
How much is the full Lhasa Knowledge Suite?
The FDA buys five Nexus products together: Derek, Meteor, Vitic, Sarah and Zeneth. Its two year award from 2018 came to $83,981, about $42,000 a year. The five year award that followed was $126,975, about $25,400 a year, and the 2025 renewal for two years is $52,734, about $26,400 a year, 3.8 percent above the five year average.
The drop from about $42,000 to $25,400 a year is the most useful number on this page for anyone negotiating a term. The products did not change. The term went from two years to five, and the annual cost fell by about 40 percent. The record cannot tell us whether a first year fee sat inside the 2018 award, but the size of the gap is reason enough to price a long term before you sign a short one.
Is Derek Nexus available on its own?
Yes. The EPA bought Derek alone for years, and a 2011 FDA award names Derek Nexus software by itself at $20,911. Derek also appears as a module inside other platforms: Optibrium lists Derek Nexus among the modules of StarDrop, so a team already paying for StarDrop can check whether a bundled license is cheaper than a direct one. The StarDrop pricing breakdown lists the modules and what Optibrium publishes about cost.
What moves a Derek Nexus quote
- Users and sites. Every EPA Derek award states one primary site and five users. More sites or more seats is the first thing that changes the number.
- Which Nexus products. Derek alone, the Derek and Sarah pair for M7, or the five product suite with Meteor, Vitic and Zeneth. The government record spans roughly $6,000 to $42,000 a year across those.
- Full or limited membership. Both appear in the awards. Ask which one the quote assumes.
- Term. The FDA's annual cost fell about 40 percent when it moved from a two year to a five year term on the same products.
Once the predictions are run, the M7 assessment still has to be written up and defended in front of a review committee. Many teams turn the assessment report into a slide deck for that meeting rather than walking the committee through a PDF.
Where Derek fits in an antibacterial project
Derek answers a safety question: does this structure carry an alert for mutagenicity, skin sensitization or another toxicity endpoint, and how confident is the reasoning. For antibacterials that question comes up early, because some classic antibacterial scaffolds carry well known alerts. Nitroaromatic groups, a textbook mutagenicity alert, sit in nitrofurantoin and metronidazole, both drugs in clinical use.
That is exactly why a toxicity alert cannot be judged alone. A flagged compound with strong activity against a carbapenem resistant Gram-negative may be worth the work of clearing the alert. A flagged compound that inhibits nothing is not worth a Derek run at all. The potency number has to sit next to the alert.
Our MIC prediction software gives that number for a pasted structure: a predicted MIC band per strain, the mechanism class and the closest published analogs. The Lab plan is $149 a month, or $1,788 a year, so the 2025 EPA Derek, Meteor and Sarah year would pay for about 8.2 years of it. Discovery, at $499 a month, adds the API, so activity and alerts can land in the same table for every compound.
Compare it with the rest of the shortlist
Derek usually sits next to an ADMET model in a safety and property budget. The ADMET Predictor price page shows what Simulations Plus charged the same agencies, about $19,000 to $20,000 a year per seat on long terms. If the compounds being assessed came out of a plate campaign, the Genedata Screener price record covers the analysis platform many screening groups use, and the drug discovery software cost overview sets every suite we have priced side by side.