The Medicinal Chemistry Unit is able to meet your needs for the synthesis of organic molecules for use in biological studies.  The lab can design and synthesize novel analogs of active molecules, resynthesize known molecules or standards, as well as prepare chemical probes for chemical biology experiments.  The focus of our work is to support validation of HTS hits and progression of the most attractive molecules to achieve chemical probe status.

Cheminformatics and Virtual Screening

Computational approaches are widely used in pharmaceutical research to enhance efficiency of the drug discovery and development pipeline. Computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) exploits state-of-the-art computational technologies to speed up the drug development process, compared to traditional drug screening. Such in-silico methods are fast and automatic, and feature low costs while maintaining high success rates. Both ligand-based and structure-based drug design approaches are powerful technologies that can be applied to virtual screening for lead identification and optimization. Traditional drug screening is a random approach, whereas the in-silico approach has the capacity to intellectually build an effective virtual small-molecule library for screening, based on known structures and/or known potent ligands. Thus, CADD helps scientists focus on the most promising compounds, so as to minimize the synthetic, in vitro and in vivo testing efforts.

The lab is also supported with cheminformatics capabilities in collaboration with the Ilana and Pascal Mantoux Institute for Bioinformatics.