Hit Identification

Once you have selected your drug target, a critical determinant of the success of your research project is going to be the quality of your chemical hits. 

At Domainex we believe that generating better quality hits ultimately will result in better drug candidates being discovered more quickly. That will give you a superior end-product, saving you time and money.

What do we mean by better quality hits? Well, we are looking for compounds that bind very efficiently to their target, that have good developability characteristics (e.g. favourable molecular and physical properties), and that are amenable to synthetic modification by our medicinal chemists to allow for rapid optimisation. Essentially, we are looking for starting points that already have many of the characteristics that you are looking for in your final drug.

Proven Expertise

We use several techniques for hit identification. When it is possible to deploy fragment-based drug design, virtual screening, or literature-to-lead approaches, we recommend one or more of these as the quickest and most cost-effective ways to generate novel chemical matter. The proven expertise and success of our scientists, and the FragmentBuilder and LeadBuilder platforms they have developed for fragment and virtual screening respectively, give us a highly differentiated platform for you to gain an early edge over your competitors.

When these targeted approaches are not applicable, we can use more general hit-finding methods such as gene-family directed or High-Throughput Screening (HTS) against your drug targets, but in doing so we maintain the same focus on identifying better hits for you by a careful pre-selection of the compounds in the screening library using various ‘drug-like’ criteria.

Domainex scientists are experts in all these fields, and we have state-of-the-art capabilities that you can find out more about through clicking the links on this page. For example, our assay development team is skilled in designing the right screens for your target, and our protein science specialists can make the quantity and quality of protein required to enable the screening technologies of choice.

Ongoing Support

These hit identification methods can either be used singly or in combination, depending on what is known about your target, and how wide a range of hit matter you wish to have. And, once we have identified hits for your target of interest, we can continue supporting your project, for example with structural biology by our expert X-ray crystallographers, and provide a multi-disciplinary team to move it seamlessly into the hit-to-lead and lead optimisation phase.