Enamine to be the exclusive supplier of Astex's MiniFrag Library

Enamine Ltd., a premier supplier of Building Blocks, Fragments and Screening Compounds, and Astex Pharmaceuticals (UK), a prominent biotech company focused on discovery and development of innovative medicines targeting cancer and CNS disorders, have cooperated to provide wide access to Astex's MiniFrag library, an efficient Fragment-based Drug Discovery tool for identification of hot and warm spots of protein targets.

The concept recently proposed by Astex (O'Reilly, Drug Discovery Today, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2019.03.009), implies high concentration crystallographic screening of a balanced set comprising 80 chemically diverse, highly soluble, ultra-low-molecular-weight fragments, that provides comprehensive insight into the nature of protein binding sites and mode of determinative ligand-target interactions, allowing to guide fragment evolution strategy and significantly facilitating structure optimization of fragment-derived lead candidates.

Enamine, which has the most extensive fragment stock database, was approved by Astex to be the exclusive supplier offering the MiniFrag Library (https://enamine.net/fragments/fragment-collection/minifrag-library) on a commercial basis. The Library is readily available from Enamine in any suitable format, including dry samples or assay-ready high concentration (1M, 100mM) aqueous soaks in containers of preferred type. The detected MiniFrag hits can be followed-up with a wide range of stock available and synthetically feasible derivatives as well as with building blocks for introduction of the relevant structural features for lead optimization.

Andrey Tarnovskiy, Sales Director, Europe, at Enamine, commented: "Astex has pioneered Fragment-based Drug Discovery and continues to excel in the development of new techniques accelerating research work in the field. We at Enamine are proud to have been given approval by Astex to leverage this advance in Fragment screening and to make the advantages and usability of the MiniFrag library easily accessible by the medchem community across the globe in a time- and cost-efficient manner."

Michael Bossert, Head Strategic Alliances at Enamine added "We have a long lasting relationship with Astex and we are excited to render this highly sophisticated discovery tool available, not only to contribute to the growth of our products pipeline but to provide it to our clients who otherwise might never have gotten a chance to access it".

Astex Pharmaceuticals
436 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0QA, UK
Jeremy Carmichael
jeremy.carmichael@astx.com

Enamine Ltd
78 Chervonotkatska St. 02094 Kyiv, Ukraine
Andrey Tarnovskiy
a.tarnovskiy@enamine.net

About Astex Pharmaceuticals
Astex is a leader in innovative drug discovery and development, committed to the fight against cancer and diseases of the central nervous system. Astex is developing a proprietary pipeline of novel therapies and has a number of partnered products being developed under collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies. Astex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. Otsuka Pharmaceutical is a global healthcare company with the corporate philosophy: "Otsuka - people creating new products for better health worldwide." Otsuka researches, develops, manufactures and markets innovative and original products, with a focus on pharmaceutical products for the treatment of diseases and nutraceutical products for the maintenance of everyday health.
For more information about Astex Pharmaceuticals, please visit http://www.astx.com
For more information about Otsuka Pharmaceutical, please visit http://www.otsuka.co.jp/en/

About Enamine
Enamine Ltd. (est. 1991), a scientifically driven fully integrated service company, possesses the World's largest and most reputed stock collections of Building Blocks (180,000) and Screening compounds (2.7 Million) and offers extensive portfolio of carefully designed Fragment Libraries, Discovery Diversity sets and Targeted Libraries. Enamine provides expertise in advanced organic synthesis, library synthesis, medicinal chemistry, HTS and pre-clinical biology to support research and development programs in life sciences and industries worldwide.
For more information about Enamine, please visit http://www.enamine.net

This release was published on openPR.