Starting the hit-to-lead phase on the right foot is essential in drug discovery, as the choice of hit classes to advance will shape the success of the entire project downstream.
Hits can be generated from multiple sources. Our experienced medchem teams evaluate hits from fragment-based approaches; medium- and high-throughput screens including those exploiting our innovative 75,000 compound Symegold library; as well as those based on literature starting points.
The initial evaluation can entail building the most effective screening cascades to assess both activities and potential liabilities, including appropriate application of our in vitro ADME profiling platform for the phase of the project, as well as involving our computational chemistry capabilities for in silico property calculations and building hypotheses. Wherever appropriate, we apply our parallel synthesis and purification platform to efficiently map structure–activity and structure–property relationships and help evaluate which are the most promising hit classes to progress.
Rapid evaluation of hit classes enables the generation of initial structure–activity and structure–property relationships, alongside an initial IP evaluation and target-candidate profile generation, to help de-risk subsequent lead-optimization efforts in a time- and cost-effective manner.
