The current Covid pandemic reminds us all of the urgent need to develop new treatments for disease. If we are to respond rapidly to new medical emergencies, we need to become more efficient at developing drugs, ideally by reducing the attrition rates that blight drug discovery and development.
Drug discovery often begins with screening a compound library to identify a compound, known as a hit, which displays a biological ‘readout’ that has been identified to be useful for treating a particular disease. For example, in the search for a new antibiotic, a hit compound that kills a target bacterium, would provide a starting point for further development. In order to maximise our chances of identifying a hit, we need to screen a large library of compounds, i.e. size is important. Compound diversity is also critical; we need to ensure our library is populated with structurally diverse compounds that effectively ‘sample’ as large a volume of available chemical space as possible. Finally, quality is also important; a library needs to be populated with compounds that possess favourable physicochemical properties that make them conducive to further development.
Traditional compound libraries often display low levels of structural diversity and comprise low-quality compounds that are often not conducive to further development; thus, even if a hit is identified from this type of library, the likelihood of it being developed into a drug is low. As a result of this low success rate, there is a drive across the pharmaceutical sector to develop compound libraries that comprise higher quality and structurally diverse molecules that should provide better starting points for drug discovery and development.
iDESIGN's 1st principal objective was to use methodology developed by chemists at The University of Birmingham (UK), to prepare new and structurally diverse molecular scaffolds, and then, working with our industrial partners at Symeres (The Netherlands) and AnalytiCon Discovery (Germany), use these scaffolds for smart library synthesis. Whilst Covid impacted on the Early-Stage Researchers’ ability to progress their research in the second half of their projects, some re-ordering of work activities ensured they successfully completed their experimental work, culminating in the delivery of new, structurally diverse compound libraries; these have been deposited in our industry partners' compound collections and are now commercially available. A sub-set of compounds were also transferred to The University of Birmingham’s compound collection.
iDESIGN’s 2nd principal objective was to train the appointed Researchers to become expert synthetic and medicinal chemists, confident research scientists, consummate professionals, effective communicators and innovators with a creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Evidencing the success and impact of iDESIGN’s training programme, three of the Researchers are already working in industry, two with the companies they worked for during their industrial placements and the third with Evotec in Verona, Italy. Of the remaining three researchers, two also plan to enter the pharmaceutical industry whilst the third plans to pursue further research in academia as a postdoctoral research fellow before moving into the pharmaceutical sector.
