Medicinal Chemistry

As one of the pillars of our integrated drug discovery platform, Red Glead Discovery (RGD) provides clients with a broad experience in medicinal chemistry and synthetic chemistry. We concentrate on driving medicinal chemistry projects from potential targets to patentable and innovative lead compounds and clinical candidates.

Why choose us

At RGD we aim to work in close partnership with our clients. We offer our scientific expertise to recognise the needs in each project and use this to provide suggestions and advice to fulfil and add value to your projects.

Our highly skilled team of chemists has extensive experience in executing multi-disciplinary drug discovery projects. We offer an innovative and efficient workflow from assessment of hit compounds to optimization of hits and leads in order to deliver candidates of high quality to our clients.

RGD has a proven track record in project management and execution of a wide range of drug targets. Our business models involve both full-time equivalent (FTE)-based and “fee for service” models.

Medicinal Chemistry & Integrated drug discovery

The scope of the research areas that RGD covers requires that the Medicinal chemistry team has a strong supporting organization. At RGD the Medicinal chemistry team works in close collaboration with ADME, in vitro biology, NMR, computational chemistry, peptide chemistry and the fragment-based lead discovery team (FBLD).

This integration is essential to facilitate an efficient design/make/test cycle that powers the drug discovery programs at RGD.

Case 1

Working in an integrated fashion, RGD assisted a biotech company with a promising compound in an early clinical phase, in the discovery of a backup compound with novel properties. The main challenge was to increase the poor oral bioavailability to a level acceptable for an orally available candidate compound. Two chemists were dedicated to the work full-time and RGD solved the challenge in less than 18 months as demonstrated by strong in vivo PK data. The primary success factor was smooth and agile collaboration between parties in several countries.

Case 2

RGD was approached by a US-based mid-size pharmaceutical company in a lead optimization program aimed to improve molecular properties and strengthen the IP position in a highly competitive field. The initial collaboration with two RGD chemists transformed into a team of eight FTE chemists conducting a full late-stage lead optimization chemistry program that involved complex synthetic routes and resulted in several novel subseries with improved and diversified properties from which a candidate compound was nominated.

Our Approach

The Medicinal Chemistry team is often the driving force in drug discovery projects and thanks to the seamless cross disciplinary interactions we have with both the biology and analytical chemistry departments, we can offer our clients comprehensive and solution-based drug discovery services. Our platform offer several approaches. They span from generating novel hits for new targets via hit-to-lead and lead optimization, to development of candidate drugs. Our chemist’s knowledge base stretches over large areas of the known chemical space, such as carbohydrate chemistry, nucleotide chemistry, organometallic chemistry, heterocyclic chemistry, and a vast knowledge of medicinal chemistry and the parameters that effect candidates for clinical research. Our laboratories are equipped with state-of-the-art instruments to work with mg to multi-gram scale.

Equipment

Main Medicinal chemistry instrumentation cover:

  • LC-MS instruments (Agilent)
  • Preparative HPLC (Gilson and Agilent)
  • Preparative HPLC-MS (Agilent)
  • Analytical HPLC (Agilent)
  • Microwave reactor
  • Automated flash systems (Isolera)
  • NMR spectrometers (400 and 500 MHz, Varian and Bruker)