The recently published paper, Cell-active small molecule inhibitors validate the SNM1A DNA repair nuclease as a cancer target, describes aspects of a collaborative study to identify small molecule inhibitors of a DNA repair nuclease (SNM1A) carried out as part of the European Lead Factory initiative.

The paper explains how expertise from several partners using techniques including high throughput screening, biochemistry, x-ray crystallography, medicinal chemistry, synthetic chemistry and cell-based assays were combined to identify inhibitors and confirm target engagement. Subsequent studies enabled the biological target to be validated as a potential approach for novel cancer therapies.

The BioAscent team has many years of experience working in productive drug discovery collaborations with biotech, academic and pharmaceutical partners, contributing their expertise in biosciences, medicinal, synthetic and computational chemistry and compound management, to generate successful outcomes.

Read the publication in full here.

About the European Lead Factory

The IMI European Lead Factory (ELF) was the largest collective drug-discovery platform in Europe. It was a decade-long collaboration with partners from major pharma, SMEs and academic groups which worked on over 120 public early drug discovery programmes. Details can be found here.

The BioAscent team has been a partner in ELF from its initiation in 2013 and was selected to provide compound management, medicinal chemistry and biochemical and biophysical support for the project. The team now brings this proven expertise, illustrated by this and other published examples, to our customers’ projects.

About BioAscent

Over the past ten years, BioAscent has delivered:

• >150 biochemical, biophysical and cellular assays for drug discovery projects, across all key target classes including GPCRs, multiple enzyme classes (including covalent programmes), nuclear receptors, protein-protein, protein-DNA and protein-RNA interactions.

• Multiple HTS and fragment screens using multiple libraries of up to 250k in size and triaged the outcomes of over 120 HTS campaigns.

• >50 hit validation/characterisation projects.

• >30 hit-to-lead campaigns, including successfully driving a project to candidate selection and out licensing to big pharma, and driving a second against an unprecedented target from initial hit finding to in vivo efficacy.

• >100,000 screening plates to global customers and partners.

The team is currently providing full compound management and logistics services to 75 biotechs in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, managing all aspects of compound aggregation, storage, QC, plating, tracking and shipping to testing partners around the world.