Domainex and SpiroChem Enter a Fragment Drug Discovery Partnership

Domainex Ltd, an integrated provider of drug discovery services that has established a world-leading position in fragment-based drug discovery and SpiroChem AG, a premium chemical and services companies specialized in the design and synthesis of proprietary collections of sp3-rich molecular fragments and associated synthetic capabilities, have established a strategic fragment drug discovery collaboration that they will co-promote globally.

Under the terms of the agreement, Domainex will enrich its existing fragment collection with a diverse set of SpiroChem fragments that it will screen with its highly efficient and cost-effective FragmentBuilder platform. The SpiroChem-sourced fragments will provide unique chemical diversity, particularly in terms of three-dimensional chemotypes. The companies will work together to offer hit expansion services on the resulting fragment hits to their clients in a seamless manner, leveraging the combined expertise of their respective chemistry teams, supported as required with biophysical and biochemical assays and structural biology.

Domainex Chief Operating Officer, Tom Mander commented ‘Since our investment in automated microscale thermophoresis instrumentation from Nanotemper Technologies back in 2016, we have seen a strong uptake of our integrated FragmentBuilder services and have initiated numerous fragment drug discovery partnerships with organisations across the world. We are delighted to be announcing this new partnership with SpiroChem, an organisation that also has a strong reputation for innovation and delivery. The additional diversity that their fragments bring to our existing collection will further strengthen and differentiate our world-leading position in fragment-based drug discovery. It will give our clients a truly unique approach to identify well-characterised and attractive chemical starting points for subsequent optimisation into drug candidates'.

SpiroChem Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Fessard added ‘Fragment-based lead discovery has demonstrated its strength in delivering new leads for drug targets over the past few years and we have seen a booming demand for our fragment collections. Our carefully designed libraries stand out of commercial "flat-land" libraries and add this 3D-character that medicinal chemists are looking for. Obviously, with higher structural complexity, fragment evolution capabilities require special synthetic skills that SpiroChem is mastering, thereby allowing for efficient fragment evolution and exploration of their chemical space. We are thrilled to collaborate with Domainex, and be able to offer a comprehensive discovery proposal, from library design and screening to efficient downstream medicinal chemistry services, all the way to candidate selection'.

About Domainex
Established in 2001, Domainex Ltd is a privately-owned, high quality, integrated drug discovery service company delivering proteins, assays, X-ray structures, hits, leads and pre-clinical drug candidates for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic and patient foundations globally.  We serve an ever-growing list of pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients including UCB, FORMA Therapeutics, Macrophage Pharma, Imperial College and The Institute of Cancer Research.  Our co-located and multi-disciplinary scientists - molecular biologists; assay biologists; medicinal, computational and analytical chemists (over 70% of whom are PhD qualified) have on average over 10 years of industrial drug discovery experience. They have been co-authors on numerous publications and been named on over 50 patent applications with our clients, supporting them transition projects successfully into pre-clinical and clinical development. We have broad therapeutic area and target class expertise, including immune-inflammatory diseases, oncology, cardiovascular conditions and diseases of the central nervous system. Our target class expertise encompasses kinases, protein-protein interactions, GPCRs, proteases and epigenetic targets, especially the lysine methyltransferases.

We have established a number of unique enabling technology platforms proven to deliver novel drug discovery outcomes including:

FragmentBuilder, an integrated suite of technologies for fragment-based drug design that has at its core microscale thermophoresis, the most efficient biophysical technique for fragment screening. Utilising less than 1mg of protein, in a matter of a few days a diverse collection of fragments can be screened, which are now complemented with unique 3D fragments from SpiroChem. Fragment hits can be further characterised for affinity and mode of binding and be transitioned seamlessly into structural elucidation by X-ray to provide the information needed for medicinal chemistry optimisation of drug properties.

Combinatorial Domain Hunting for the screening of 100,000 or more constructs in a matter of a few months to identify novel domains of targets/antigens.

LeadBuilder for the efficient virtual screening of targets against a carefully selected collection of ~2 million compounds.

About SpiroChem
SpiroChem AG is a privately-held, premium fine chemistry company based in Basel, Switzerland. SpiroChem operates on a dual business model, offering products that have been crafted for medicinal chemistry applications (a catalogue of building blocks, proprietary fragment libraries and a collection of unique scaffolds for DEL technology) and accompanying synthetic and medicinal chemistry services to help our customers worldwide accelerate their discovery R&D projects. Our elite team of synthetic and medicinal chemists was trained in world-leading institutions and combines years of industrial experience in pharma, biotechs and CRO companies. With a higher than average PhD-trained composition, our team has demonstrated since its inception in 2011 that "Chemistry is the solution, not the problem". We have delivered on highly complex discovery projects where our chemical capabilities were central to success. Our challenge-minded attitude means that we do not shy away from complexity, even when natural products, carbohydrates and nucleoside are involved. Our unique set of chemical expertise is a strong component of our offering and supports fragment evolution on our fragment library and downstream medicinal chemistry efforts in a seamless manner.

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