Capabilities

The DDU is widely recognised as the most developed and complete drug discovery engine working across multiple therapeutic areas in UK academia.

Hit Discovery

Purpose-designed laboratories with industry standard equipment and software for medium and high-throughput screening
Development of biochemical and cell- based assays for new targets and phenotypes
Utilise high quality screening sets, circa 350,000 compounds including diversity and focused sub-sets
Variety of assay platforms including biochemical, biophysical and phenotypic
Fragment-based screenings: SPR, NMR and Octet RED284
High-content imaging and analysis
Industry standard data management - IDBS ActivityBase, Dotmatics data management suite
Well-validated process for efficient use of compound stocks and delivery of high-quality data sets

Full in-house Compound Management plating and storage facilities for latch racks and microplates from a dedicated team.
High throughput liquid handling robotics utilising both tip based and acoustic technologies - Tecan Fluent & Evo, and Echo 650 & 550 instruments.
Ability to perform Cherry Picking, Library Screening, Potency curve generation, and Plate Reformatting in 96, 384 and 1536 well plate formats.
Manage a high quality screening library comprising of over 350,000 compounds, comprised of Diversity screening sets and Focus libraries.
Manage and curate libraries for the DDU and external partners, supplying certain libraries globally.

Extensive laboratories equipped for synthetic medicinal chemistry, including 40 double fume hoods
Multi-parameter optimisation (hit-to-lead and lead-to-candidate), identification of drug-like molecules
Pharmacophore and series specific in silico models at an early stage
Structure-based drug design using protein-ligand structures
Ligand-based computational chemistry for phenotypic series
State-of-the-art compound synthesis platforms in place including parallel array synthesis and automated purification with stringent quality control analysis.
Routine NMR spectra as well as fragment screening and structure elucidation.

Supports all phases of the drug discovery process from target druggability to hit identification, hit-to-lead and lead optimisation
Compound design using ligand and structure based approaches, molecular dynamics (MD), quantum mechanics (QM) and machine learning (ML)
Chemoinformatic support for chemical space analysis, library design and HTS results triage
Multiparameter optimisation platform integrating QM, ML and artificial intelligence driven generative approaches

Cloning, expression and purification of protein targets, from construct design to purified protein using E.coli, Pichia pastoris, Baculovirus and Expi293 (mammalian) expression systems.
Structural Biology & Biophysical Techniques
SPR: hit validation and determining enzyme kinetics
All aspects of protein crystallography, including 3D structure determination of protein targets complexed with hit molecules, facilitating the rational design of more effective inhibitors
Access to synchrotron radiation sources in the UK (Diamond) and Europe (ESRF).

Integrated DMPK group supporting hit and lead optimisation programmes
Drive towards identifying leads with better drug-like characteristics early in the drug discovery process.
Industry standard in vitro ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, toxicity) and DMPK (drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics) profiling
State-of-the-art UPLC-MS/MS
In vivo PK/PD and in vivo PoC / efficacy studies

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please get in touch.