Lead discovery and optimization play a crucial role to determine the quality of clinical candidates. After this process, a set of compounds can be screened that interact with the target and the confirmed hits have specific activity against the target. Creative Biostructure performs comprehensive lead discovery and optimization solutions including library construction, library screening (in silico, in vitro and in vivo), hit-to-lead optimization and preclinical evaluation, etc.
Modern drug discovery involves the identification of screening hits, medicinal chemistry, and optimization of those hits to increase the affinity, selectivity, efficacy/potency, metabolic stability, and oral bioavailability. Creative Biostructure adopts optimal strategies to reduce the potential of side effects of candidates or increase the half-life of candidates during drug discovery procedure.
For lead discovery, we mainly generate hits through three approaches: 1) high-throughput screening (HTS); 2) virtual screening; 3) fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD). Besides, we support the discovery of leads from existing leads/drugs and natural products.
For lead optimization, approaches are taken to improve potency, selectivity, physicochemical and pharmacological properties of the lead compounds: 1) design, screen and synthesize novel lead compounds from scratch; 2) design the focused libraries made up of diverse analogs; 3) develop the quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) model; 4) optimize the structures by scaffold hopping, pharmacophore modeling, and similarity search; 5) improve and optimize the pharmacokinetics (PK) profile and in vivo efficacy; 6) identify potential safety issues by screening assays.
The discovery and optimization of lead compounds requires extensive multidisciplinary cooperation, and our highly responsive team is made up of interdisciplinary scientists and specialists in chemistry, structural and computational biology, drug design, biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology. In addition, the advantages of working with us include:
