Capabilities

The MCCB group has experience in managing drug discovery projects in both academia and industry and has worked extensively on a wide variety of biological targets within a number of therapeutic areas. The group has development capabilities spanning the pre-clinical drug discovery process from hit identification right through to generation of an optimised pre-clinical candidate (Figure 1). Additionally, the group has experience of facilitating the understanding of biological processes through the identification and optimisation of chemical probes, for instance to better understand the clinical relevance of the target.

Figure 1. Pre-clinical drug discovery pathway and overlap with MCCB group core technologies

The group has core capabilities in a number of key areas for which bioactive molecules or probes may be identified and optimised, including:  

• Medicinal chemistry
• Synthetic chemistry
• Computational chemistry and virtual drug design, including structure- and ligand-based design and de novo design
• Combinatorial chemistry

The following resources are also available:

• High-throughput screening facilities, including data gathering and analysis systems
• Access to general screening libraries
• High-throughput purification and analysis systems (LCMS)
• NMR for structural elucidation

These capabilities and resources can be used in isolation or in tandem as appropriate in order to progress the collaborators project to the pre-agreed objective (Figure 2).

Figure 2. MCCB group core capabilities