Medicines Discovery Catapult
Scientist
on
September 5, 2024
This installment of Supplier Spotlight® highlights Medicines Discovery Catapult, an independent drug discovery innovation centre reshaping drug discovery for patient benefit. Their services are available on the Scientist.com marketplace.
1. What is your company’s mission?
Our vision is to reshape drug discovery for patient benefit by transforming great science into better treatments through partnership.
We develop pioneering, impactful R&D collaborations by enabling access to technology and expertise to help projects succeed. In doing so, we help create a thriving drug discovery sector that translates the best of science into the best new treatments for the benefit of patients worldwide.
2. What products and services do you offer?
We deliver breakthrough science-based technologies across many areas of drug discovery. However, there are some specific areas we are paying particular focus to. Through our advanced laboratory facilities, we deliver projects in clinical and preclinical biomarkers, cellular sciences and translational imaging.
Although many of our capabilities are disease-agonistic, much of our work is targeted in the following therapeutic areas: oncology, neuroscience, infectious disease, immune biology and complex medicines. We provide decision-making data that enables partners to progress their assets to clinical and commercial exploitation, which is essential to the success of drug discovery.
3. What problems do you solve?
Together, we support drug discovery innovators by making world-class expertise, facilities, complex technologies and advanced analytics accessible to enable successful medicine discovery.
With our team of specialists, we are ideally placed to identify key areas where drug innovators need advanced skills to help them progress their drug discovery programs.
We provide the right environment to enable drug discovery companies to de-risk their assets now and in the future. We also develop technologies to boost R&D productivity and stay at the cutting edge of drug discovery.
4. What are the most innovative tools and technologies that you offer?
- A Molecubes PET CT imaging system that offers highly sensitive and 3D dimensional functional imaging readouts to a picomolar concentration and provides IVIS bioluminescence and fluorescent readouts.
- The latest mass spectrometry technologies and imaging analysis tools, which we leverage to advise on protocols, design novel workflows and acquire and analyse data.
- Advanced spatial transcriptomics and proteomics tools for a better understanding of disease. We have our NanoString GeoMX Digital Spatial Profiler platform for spatial tissue analyses in our laboratory.
- A variety of high-resolution and high-content microscopes. We also use super-resolution microscopy to evaluate protein-protein interactions on the nanoscale.
5. What are your competitive advantages?
Working in close collaboration, our team is on hand to define a bespoke project plan and approach, offer specific experiments within a larger project or provide access to biorepositories or samples. Undaunted by complex challenges, we apply our insights and expertise to solve project challenges and increase the chance of success.
We provide guidance, identify the right partners for collaboration, fill gaps in an existing project plan and help manage project delivery. You can also benefit from access to specialist scientific experts and costly technologies in a flexible manner as you need them.
6. Who are your clients?
We work in collaboration with partners across the life sciences sector, including global pharmaceutical companies, biotech innovators and drug development institutions. Our team supports projects across our range of capabilities, and we can also facilitate specific experiments within a larger project.
7. What new products and services are you developing in 2024?
We have recently developed and launched the Chemical Protein Stability Assay (CPSA). This target engagement assay uses a simplified, single-well, plate-based workflow that doesn’t require plate transfer, making it ideal for compound screening and hit finding. The CPSA is compatible with multiple assay endpoints and does not require a tracer ligand or modifying the target protein.
The assay is broadly applicable to a wide range of cellular protein targets and is particularly useful in early hit identification and lead optimization, avoiding issues with cellular permeability and large-scale protein purification.
8. Where are your laboratories and offices located?
With a team of over 150 specialists, our cutting-edge facilities, complex technologies and advanced analytics are based in our laboratories at Alderley Park in Cheshire, UK. We have a highly skilled and diverse range of scientific experts. Their experience covers many areas of drug discovery, and they work to further support the drug discovery community to help get medicines to patients faster.
Whether you are focused on creating new medicines or progressing a new innovative technology, our team will be able to help with your project. Speak to us today and see how we can help you make the next move count.