Compound Management


Continued from page 21


5 Schneider, G. Automating drug discovery. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (2017). doi:10.1038/nrd. 2017.232. 6 Sinclair I, Stearns R, Pringle S, Wingfield J et al. Novel Acoustic Loading of a Mass Spectrometer: Toward Next- Generation High-Throughput MS Screening. J Lab Autom. 2016 Feb;21(1):19-26. doi: 10.1177/2211068215619124. 7 Mcgilvray, A. Compound screening: Fresh hunting ground. Nature 533, (2016). 8 Rees S, Gribbon P, Birmingham K, Janzen WP, Pairaudeau G. Towards a hit for every target. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. 2016 Jan;15(1):1-2. doi: 10.1038/nrd.2015.19. 9 Kogej, T et al. Big pharma screening collections: more of the same or unique libraries? The AstraZeneca-Bayer Pharma AG case. Drug Discovery Today 18, 1014-1024 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.drudis.2012.10.011. 10 Mullard, A. European Lead Factory opens for business. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 12, 173-175 (2013). 11 Horvath, D et al. Design of a General-Purpose European Compound Screening Library for EU-OPENSCREEN. ChemMedChem 9, 2309-2326 (2014). doi: 10.1002/cmdc. 201402126.


Pooling resources


Throughout the drug discovery and development industry, more and more organisations have come to the realisation that no individual company will be successful on its own. The need for collabora- tive efforts has led to an era of increased co-opera- tion among pharma, biotech and academic research centres7.


Compound sharing is one trend that has enhanced library diversity for a number of organi- sations. AstraZeneca, for instance, has teamed up with Sanofi to freely share nearly a quarter-million compounds and has an agreement with Bayer through which each pharma is able to screen new targets against both companies’ entire compound portfolios8,9. The trend to open up pharma com- pound collections for screening against academic research centre targets has gathered pace in recent years. At AstraZeneca, this has created the demand to support more than 30 additional hit-finding campaigns annually with subsets of the corporate compound collection. There are many such agree- ments in the industry today, underscoring a will- ingness to combine expertise in the interest of help- ing all organisations accelerate the time to finding a hit for any given target.


One of the reasons these collaborations are so popular is that academic institutions are centres of fundamental biological understanding for the tar- gets of interest in drug discovery. From generating more information about biological targets to screening compounds, projects that once con- sumed significant resources and risk at pharma and biotech companies are now being performed in academia, often funded by government or disease foundation grants.


Many of these academic groups and their phar- ma partners are sharing novel compounds to help the broader research community. The European Lead Factory is an excellent example: seven phar- mas pooled and donated 270,000 compounds while smaller companies and academic teams con- tributed 230,000 compounds to create the Joint European Compound Library10. Similarly, EU- OPENSCREEN is a new project that aims to use a share-and-share-alike approach to encourage users of its compound library to contribute results from their own bioactivity research to the rest of the net- work11. Here at AstraZeneca, scientists from the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK will share a collaborative space in the UK Center for Lead Discovery at AstraZeneca’s research centre in Cambridge, UK, accessing our compound library to test novel drug targets. The progress being made from this spirit of col-


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laboration will be a critical driver for developing effective new therapies. Distributing the challenges and costs of hit discovery across many more organ- isations – including academic research institutes – is a smart means of mitigating risk and accessing the best science.


Looking ahead


Thanks to more frequent co-operative hit discov- ery programmes, the need for increased screening capacity is pronounced. As we learn so much more about targets, drug discovery scientists must have access not only to more screening but also to smarter screening.


At AstraZeneca, this situation drove us to make a significant investment in rethinking our approach to compound screening – everything from where those compounds are stored to how rapidly they can be accessed and assayed. With a multi-vendor collaboration we have managed to develop and integrate new automation, labware and software to enable a completely novel approach to compound storage and management with major implications for screening capacity and speed, as well as reduced costs. While this will add real value to our own dis- covery pipelines, it is an approach that could be implemented by any organisation willing to make such a commitment. Innovative automation and collaboration will be integral to a future of smart screening and accelerated drug discovery. DDW


Dr Clive Green is Executive Director and Head of Sample Management, Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK, where he oversees the company’s collection of human bio- logical samples and small molecules. He spent more than 10 years as a medicinal chemist and earned his PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Nottingham.


Dr Philip Spencer is Team Leader of Sample Management, Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK, where he is responsible for the global deployment of acoustic technologies. He has more than 15 years of experi- ence working in compound management and earned his PhD in synthetic chemistry at the University of Sussex.


Drug Discovery World Winter 2017/18


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