Leap-to-Lead platform for expanding Drug Discovery beyond its current limits
Summary:
Health and wellbeing are among the basic and most important needs of humanity. Medicines have a major impact on the quality of life and are essential for treating various diseases. Despite the numerous achievements of the pharmaceutical industry, there are still diseases without effective treatment. Pharmaceutical industry is continuously searching for new compounds that can become drug candidates against such diseases. Development of one new drug can take about 15 years, cost up to 2-5 billion USD and includes several steps of research and development. The first step of the process is called drug discovery. Our company, BioBlocks is a collaborative medicinal chemistry research organization focused on drug discovery from initial lead discovery to development candidates, serving the needs of our clients: pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Answering to our identified clients’ need, using our experiences, we have developed and patented the Leap-to-Lead™ (L2L) concept, with the aim to expand Drug Discovery beyond its current limits. L2L consists of two major components that work in concert a Comprehensive Fragment Library (CFL), a proprietary collection of available fragments, and Syntheverse™, >500 Billion compound database. The next phase of platform development will expand its scope towards meeting its full potential: making it routine to identify viable new chemical matter for biological pathways that do not have a traditional target. We aim to speed up adding novel physical scaffolds to the CFL, for which we need to improve our internal chemical technology tools, and increase our resources for the project. Thus, we need to get external funding, such as investment and/or grant, e.g. SME Instrument Phase 2. We intend to make a convincing, detailed business plan that will increase our chances for obtaining such subsidy. The objective of this Phase 1 project is to prepare a feasibility study for these activities.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 827248.