Medicinal Chemistry

At ChemPartner, all our medicinal chemistry leaders have over 10 years of international experience with supporting drug discovery projects. Our knowledgeable leaders on the ground in Shanghai are able to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients’ medicinal chemistry teams. Our clients also have the option to choose to work with our highly experienced, US-based scientists who can provide dedicated design/leadership and project management support to drive their programs. We have a long track record of delivering for our clients at all stages of drug discovery from high-throughput screening (HTS) triage, hit identification, lead identification, and lead optimization through to pre-clinical.

Hit Confirmation

Our company began with synthetic chemistry, and we have continuously honed our skills for over nearly two decades. Our chemists and compound management group process 1000+ compounds per week. We use our synthesis skills at every stage of our medicinal chemistry projects, and our team can quickly and efficiently re-synthesize HTS hits for confirmation and quickly make analogs for series confirmation.

Hit Identification

Pairing our strength in synthetic chemistry with our experience in medicinal chemistry, and working closely with our screening, fragment-based screening (FBS), and DMPK colleagues, we can efficiently identify hits from HTS, FBS campaigns, or other starting points of the discovery process. After establishing hit validity, we map out a route to either quickly establish proof of concept in newer projects or triage structural classes in mature targets to identify several classes of hits. ChemPartner has also established its own state-of-the-art FBS service platform to offer our clients a cost-effective hit ID service.

Hit-to-Lead

Our chemists and project teams refine hits into lead status. Our experienced medicinal chemistry teams focus on the critical path assays to solve issues with potency, selectivity, ADME, etcetera to efficiently progress compounds into leads. We keep cycle times low and utilize our in-house computational and rational drug design strategies.

Lead Optimization

Working with leads, our project leaders focus on hypothesis-driven medicinal chemistry, matched pair techniques, and rational drug design to bring the projects leads into pre-clinical status. Our expert biology, pharmacology, and DMPK groups have a wide range of in vitro and in vivo models for rapid analysis and profiling of compounds, and our project teams work closely together to minimize cycle time to effectively solve any remaining compound issues.

Computational Chemistry Support

Our exceptional computational chemistry group has a wide range of support tools available to assess many aspects of hits and leads using a variety of techniques, including both structure- or ligand-based designs. From assessing novelty and diversity of screening collections to using property filters to select monomers or establish correlations between physical properties and assay data, our project teams have access to any computational support tools and expertise necessary.

Tailored Collaborations

We have extensive experience with many types of collaborations, from simple chemistry support to co-piloted projects where our clients share design responsibility with us and all the way through to where our partners simply provide the target, and we take care of the entire project from HTS to identifying a pre-clinical compound.

The cross-functional capability of ChemPartner allows for fully integrated service projects where we provide the discovery research teams in chemistry, biology, and ADME. Our US-based team of experienced medicinal chemists takes the integrated service model even further by providing a sophisticated design and innovation partner, fully enabled by co-located Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) expertise, who can facilitate project team management and communication to meet the client’s specific requirements. We can add all or any additional experts from biology and DMPK. No matter the collaboration parameters, our clients own all the IP generated from our efforts, and we rigorously guard all IP in a multi-tiered, proactive approach.