Medicinal Chemistry

Design, synthesise, analyse – from hit compounds to candidate drugs

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To have a successful small-molecule drug research project you will need a high-quality medicinal chemistry team, and the chemists at Domainex are among the very best in the business.

A leading medicinal chemistry service provider, we can efficiently progress your project from hit identification through lead generation and optimisation, to the nomination of promising drug candidates. Over 85% of our medicinal chemists have a PhD and, combined with their extensive experience in developing drug candidates against a broad range of target classes and therapeutic areas, they give you access to an unrivalled breadth of knowledge and a proven track record of successful innovation (for case studies see TBK-1/IKK, Der p1 and Tankyrase).

Every Compound Counts

Domainex chemists will provide you with a medicinal chemistry programme tailored to your specific requirements. Our “every compound counts” philosophy means that we design molecules taking into account all of the relevant properties, including biological activity, selectivity, pharmacokinetic and toxicology properties, to produce developable, patentable compounds and minimise late-stage attrition. We are able to offer you integrated teams of medicinal and computational chemists, protein, structural and assay biologists, and ADME/DMPK scientists – all co-located in Cambridge, UK. This means that we are able to keep the time for each “design-make-test” cycle to a minimum, so that we can progress your research programmes more quickly and efficiently.

Domainex can also apply plate-based chemistry and Direct-to-Biology (D2B) techniques to rapidly generate SAR. Find out more on our dedicated D2B webpage. 

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State-of-the-Art Drug Design and Scale Up

Our skilled chemists are true ‘drug-hunters’, with an average of 10 years’ of industrial drug discovery experience. They have a proven track record of success of discovering pre-clinical candidates and drugs in clinical trials on behalf of our clients. They have direct access to state-of-the-art drug design software – including tools from BIOVIA, CCDC, Dotmatics (Browser, ELN and Vortex) and Reaxys – and property profiling of target compounds with software such as ACDLabs is absolutely routine for us. We are highly skilled in the art of synthetic chemistry, including array synthesis, meaning our chemists have the ability to make the right compounds for your programme and not just those that are easily accessible. As well as traditional drug design, the team has expertise in the targeted protein degradation field, and in the design and synthesis of biological probes and other conjugated moieties such as biotinylated compounds. Finally, our scale-up lab can meet your needs for larger quantities of active ingredient for more extensive biological evaluation.

Case studies