Proprietary Platforms & Assets
Enabling technologies
Astex's achievements in fragment based drug discovery and development rest on a strong foundation of integrated platform technologies and capabilities that span structural biology, computational and medicinal chemistry, DMPK and cell and translational biology. Astex has developed proprietary methods in many of these areas, enabling the rapid prosecution of targets for drug discovery.
Fragment-based chemistry
Fragment design and synthesis, lead discovery and lead optimization are carried out by a highly experienced team of medicinal chemists, drawn from a number of major pharmaceutical companies. Leading edge technologies are applied to ongoing lead discovery programs, including structure-driven fragment evolution, fragment-linking and structure-based drug design.
Structural Biophysics
X-ray crystallography is the only technique able to accurately define the binding mode of low-affinity fragments bound to a target protein at the atom level of resolution. Astex is able to efficiently discover and develop novel, ligand efficient fragments using its high-throughput X-ray crystallography capability coupled to other complementary biophysical techniques. This enables low affinity but structurally characterised chemical fragments to be rapidly identified and efficiently transformed, using iterative rounds of chemical synthesis and crystallography, into compact and highly tractable drug leads.
Proprietary Informatics Systems
Our proprietary AutoSolve™ software generates protein-ligand complexes by automated processing of X-ray data at an unprecedented rate. The time taken to generate protein-ligand crystal structures from X-ray data has been reduced from days to minutes.
The protein-ligand complexes can be viewed using AstexViewer, a web browser-based molecular viewer. Rapid and user-friendly access to complex molecular information assists the research scientist in making informed decisions.
As part of the Pyramid™ process Astex applies computational chemistry and informatics technology to perform in silico docking on a large scale, to support its structure-based lead discovery approaches. Astex scientists use these methods to pre-select, from virtual libraries of millions of compounds, compounds to be chemically synthesised and experimentally tested using Astex’s proprietary structural screening technologies.
Astex also has an exclusive collaboration with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) for access to the source code for their GOLD software, one of the world’s leading in silico docking technologies.
Exclusive access to the source code of GOLD allows Astex to constantly refine and improve the scoring function of this world leading docking software