(1130-A) Greenpharma – Prestwick Chemical: Catalysts of your drug discovery

Abstract: Drug discovery is a time-consuming, high-cost and high-risk process with a low success rate. Thus, it has become an urgent matter to find new strategies to overcome these challenges. Among the different approaches, drug repurposing or repositioning has gained a lot of interest over the past years. Also known as old drugs for new use, it is an efficient, smart, cost-effective and fast way to identify new applications for old drugs. Several angles and a range of valuable tools have been developed to achieve this strategy and accelerate lead discovery.

Among these tools, highly relevant and smart chemical screening libraries have been designed to ensure screening performance. The libraries are focused on approved drugs, drugs fragments and more recently drugs combinations. The latter has proven to be a valuable method in different therapeutic areas. For instance, combining drugs that have different mechanisms of action allows to overcome the challenge of drug resistance in oncology.

Furthermore, once a hit is found, post-HTS services can offer deeper investigation, from ligand and structure-based analogue search to custom synthesis of relevant compounds. Medicinal Chemistry services can support drug discovery projects in multiple ways, coupled with both chemoinformatic and organic synthesis development. These two complementary techniques include, inter alia, exploration of ultra large chemical space, docking on protein 3D structures with estimated affinity, supply of the identified analogues, QSAR study, hit-to-lead optimization and NCE synthesis.