Philosophy First

About fifteen years ago, combinatorial chemistry (or parallel synthesis) promised to change the way drugs were discovered. Most people are now somewhat disappointed with the way this has turned out. The "new technology" found some application in lead generation but, in most organizations, didn't find its way up the value chain. In most pharmaceutical R & D organizations, few medicinal chemists are actually using parallel synthesis techniques. We suspect that this is because of the complexity and somewhat inappropriate application of technology to this field. It was too hard to use if you didn't use it all the time.

So what many companies did was set up a high throughput chemistry group that understands all this complex stuff and gets to do other peoples chemistry when they need multiple similar compounds. This makes sense, given the current state of the art. However, in a discovery organization, this "handoff of chemistry" is fairly inefficient and often political and bureaucratic. There's a battle over who gets to use these free "hands."

We believe that a more attractive model is for chemists all along the value chain to perform their own parallel synthesis. This, of course, only makes sense if the chemists know how to do it. It should be almost as simple as how they do it one at a time.

Medicinal chemists could probably benefit from using parallel synthesis techniques to advance SAR exploration in 5% to 30% of their projects. This depends almost entirely on the chemistry they're doing. If you're going to return to something you haven't used in a while, it needs to accessible.

Technology

At InnovaSyn, we believe that medicinal chemists are most productive doing chemistry. They enjoy, employ, and keep up with the technology of chemistry much more than the "other technologies" of robotics, computers, automation, and equipment design. However, as demands grow for chemists to do more, make more and analyze more, there is value in these other technologies. This value is best realized when the tools it brings to chemistry are robust, easy to use and make sense to chemists. We believe that our products, from our fully functional yet versatile reactors, to our robotics systems, which offer many capabilities with unprecedented ease of use, will help meet the demands of today's chemist.

Making and testing new molecular entities (compounds) is a fundamental requirement for modern drug discovery. Over the last fifteen years, as the ability to test molecules for therapeutic activity has grown explosively, so has the need to make compounds faster and cheaper. Over that period of time, our group at Sphinx Laboratories (Eli Lilly & Co.) developed a number of ways to accomplish this task. It was done, not by developing complex instruments, but by understanding the fundamental challenges of organic synthesis and bringing the appropriate application of technology to bear on the problem. The emphasis has been on simplicity, flexibility, ease of learning and ease of use. We believe that, in the future, the tools that survive will look a lot like the tools we have developed today.

SynthArray-24 in various configurations