Enabling Success in Lead Identification – Development of a HTS Library at Sygnature Discovery

The identification of lead compounds is a pivotal moment of a drug discovery program. It can often be achieved through modifications to prior art with published ligands, natural products or endogenous ligands as key starting points.

However, when the target of interest is novel or underexplored, the availability of known ligands may be limited, or they may have have properties ill-suited for development into lead compounds. In these cases a screening approach can be used to identify hit compounds.

High throughput screening (HTS) of compound libraries has been driven through the advances in robotics and automation and now plays a central role in identifying hits suitable for lead optimisation. An alternative screening approach is fragment based screening, involving compounds with lower molecular weight (M.W.) and lower lipophilicity (LogP) than most HTS compounds.

At Sygnature Discovery we are building a lead-like screening library, through the purchase of commercial compounds (LeadFinder Library) and the synthesis of novel proprietary compounds. Additionally a fragment library which overlaps our HTS library is also offered as part of our overall screening platform.