Cresset ‘Ignites’ drug discovery advance in alliance with Enamine

The groundbreaking technology will enable the rapid 3D virtual screening of ultra-large chemical spaces in the early drug discovery process, which has been shown to increase the efficiency of the process by over one hundredfold.

Virtual screening is an integral feature of the early drug discovery process used to identify small molecules that are likely to bind to a drug target and stand a higher chance of becoming viable pre-clinical drug candidates.

The technology has already been successfully applied to Enamine’s library of over 38 billion make-on-demand molecules.

It has traditionally been performed by generating 3D conformations of the molecules to be screened and then computational processes on each conformation. However, this approach becomes unfeasible when it is used to screen ultra-large chemical spaces, as the storage costs quickly become astronomical as the number of compounds in the space increases.

Ignite™ is a form of virtual screening technology developed by Cresset that utilises knowledge of the construction of these ultra-large chemical spaces, in terms of reagents as synthons and reactions, that allows the rapid screening of the space.

Vladimir Ivanov, Enamine’s Executive Vice-President said, “Chemical space is countless and we, at Enamine, have developed an approach to its synthetically accessible parts like Enamine REAL Space. We are always happy to see an application of our make-on-demand compounds to speed up delivering new medicines.”

Cresset’s Chief Executive Officer, Rob Scoffin, added: “Virtual screening on ultra-large chemical spaces is currently mostly performed using 2D methods. Ignite provides a novel strategy for fast 3D screening of billions of compounds enabling our clients to access novel chemical starting material for their research programmes in collaboration with our Discovery CRO scientists.”