XChem Facility offers new Supports for Chemical Probe and Drug Development

The Structural Genomic Consortium (SGC) Oxford and Diamond Light Source (Diamond) have announced that Enamine is to become a key supplier of poised fragment and analogue libraries to its XChem facility. The Ukraine-based chemical company will offer a new generation of the hit-finding library, Diamond-SGC-iNEXT (DSI) Poised Library to facilitate fast and productive fragment-based lead discovery (FBLD), a common approach in academia and industry for developing new chemical probes and drug starting points (leads) from weak starting evidence, namely fragment hits.

The XChem facility for fragment screening by X-ray crystallography was set up as a joint collaboration to ensure public access to efficient FBLD; the DSI Poised Library comprises 768 highly soluble fragments.

Prof Frank von Delft, Head of the XChem Collaboration and Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source, explained: “The XChem facility has already helped over 60 users find thousands of hits across over 80 targets. To address the subsequent challenge, that chemical elaboration is generally expensive and time consuming, we developed and published the poised approach. Poised fragments can be synthesised in one step from commercially available starting materials using robust, high-yielding reactions, so that libraries of analogues can be synthesised quickly and at a low cost. Coupled with high-throughput biophysical methods, such as XChem screening but also NMR or SPR, this should provide a cost-efficient approach to early-stage fragment-based lead design.”

Dr Anthony Bradley, Project Leader on Fragment Development at SGC Oxford, added: “We quickly discovered that to realise the full power of the approach, we urgently needed to address the problem of compound supply. We are thus delighted to work with Enamine for the materialisation of the DSI Poised Library, fully benefiting from Enamine’s extensive stock of building blocks, capabilities and proven industry solutions. This puts both the primary library and follow-up analogue series within budgets and timelines of even exploratory compound discovery efforts worldwide. The SGC Oxford will be making extensive use of this offering in its many ongoing and future compound development projects.”

Michael Bossert, Head of Strategic Alliances at Enamine, commented: “The high technological degree of specialisation of Diamond and its unique XChem facility, was key to this collaboration. It is important to collaborate with high-tech companies in order to launch high-value technology-based products that aim to improve our customers R&D efficiencies and discovery project successes.”