Member Article

South East drugs firms secure funding for research

Isogenica and Biolauncher, together with Cresset Group have announced funding from the Technology Strategy Board.

The funding will be used for a £1m project to develop a highly-scalable approach to small molecule drug discovery.

It will enable the consortium to develop an integrated platform to identify diverse small molecules active against drug targets using very large peptide libraries to explore chemical space.

The consotia’s objective is to demonstrate that this platform provides a new scalable approach to the early stage drug discovery challenges that is rapid, cost effective and applicable to intracelluler, extracellular and membrane bound drug targets.

Rowan Gardner, who is leading the consortia’s business development activity, said: “The diversity of the chemical libraries in corporate collections can be quite limited and so the percentage of chemical space represented is small.

“Isogenica’s peptide libraries are designed to be structurally very diverse and sample a much greater volume of chemical space.

“Also, in addition to acting as a structural template, there is a high probability of finding binding peptides which have immediate utility as reagents for probing the target biology and supporting the drug development process.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .