The Fragment-based Screening (FBS) team at ChemPartner is dedicated to providing a cost-effective and high-quality lead generation solution for clients.

Our FBS team has an in-depth understanding of the properties required for the discovery and development of pharmaceutical compounds and biologics. We excel in combining effective hit generation solutions, such as fragment-based screening, with chemistry, biology, and DMPK services to efficiently drive drug discovery projects forward.

 

Our FBS capabilities include:

Screening of Fragment Libraries

• Ligand Observe NMR methods
• Saturation Transfer Difference (STD)
• WaterLOGSY (wLOGSY)
• Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG)

 

Library Preparation of Client or Custom Libraries

• Identity, solubility, and purity determination
• Automated smart pooling
• Positive control at regular intervals
• Diversity analysis

 

Follow-up Analysis of Hits

• Validation (follow-up of singletons)
• Rank-order, clustering of hits

 

Target Protein Generation

• Protein synthesis and purification

 

Target Preparation

• Screen design
• Sample optimization
• Experimental optimization

 

Complimentary Capabilities

• Orthogonal screening methods (e.g. MST, DSF, HCS, SPR, TSA)
• X-Ray crystallography
• Computational chemistry
• SAR design and synthesis to support hit optimization
• Biological assay design and support

 

Fragment Library

The ChemPartner fragment library has been specifically designed by computational and medicinal chemists to investigate as much chemical space as possible, within a specific range of molecular and physicochemical properties, making any hits discovered the ideal starting point for a drug discovery project.

Compounds in the ChemPartner library are selected on chemical diversity, good solubility in aqueous media, and adhere to the “rule of three” criteria:

• Molecular weight < 300
• clogP ≤ 3
• Number of hydrogen bond donors ≤ 3
• Number of hydrogen bond acceptors ≤ 3

 

Our unique fragment library of 2000+ compounds is a combination of specifically selected fragments from:

• Commercial fragments
• Internal small molecule collections
• Fragments based upon FDA approved drugs
• 19F- containing fragments
• Covalent fragments

 

Screening External Libraries

In addition to the ChemPartner fragment library, we are also able to use our FBS platform to screen:

• Client-provided fragment libraries
• Client-selected commercial libraries
• Custom commercial libraries

 

Additional Capabilities

In addition to our FBS platform, ChemPartner is able to provide:

• NMR-based Compound Quality Check
  • Identity
  • Purity
  • Solubility
• Fragment Pooling
  • Randomized pooling
  • Smart pooling

 

Versatile NMR Screening Methods

Our primary recommendation would be to conduct an initial fragment screen of a 1000-member fragment library using NMR as the primary technique with confirmation of hits by orthogonal methods.

The first stage would be to screen the library using an NMR STD protocol, followed by further investigation of the hits identified using NMR wLOGSY or CPMG.

ChemPartner has access to a number of high field NMR instruments (600MHz or 700MHz) with cryoprobe technology.

 

Fragment hits using three NMR techniques:

• CPMG
• STD
• WLOGSY

 

Hits generated using the NMR platform could then be profiled further using orthogonal biophysical techniques such as MST, DSF, and SPR to determine Kd and kinetics.

 

Hit Elaboration

ChemPartner is confident that our FBS platform will provide you with high quality hit compounds.

Our crystallography team can obtain high-resolution structures to guide the subsequent fragment elaboration.

Additionally, our skilled and experienced synthetic, medicinal, and computational chemists can support the development of hit molecules into clinical candidates.