Diamond Light Source (Diamond) and the Structural Genomic Consortium (SGC) Oxford announced today that Enamine, a chemical company and producer of novel chemical building blocks and screening libraries, will become a key supplier of poised fragment and analogue libraries to its XChem facility. Enamine will offer a new generation of the hit-finding library, Diamond-SGC-iNEXT (DSI) Poised Library to enable fast and productive fragment-based lead discovery (FBLD).

Diamond, in collaboration with the SGC Oxford, set up the XChem facility for fragment screening by X-ray crystallography to ensure public access to efficient FBLD. In addition, to enable fast and productive lead development, the collaboration developed the concept of ‘poised fragments’ (Cox et al., Chemical Science, 2016), which constitutes its frontline screening strategy. FBLD is a common approach in academia and industry for developing new chemical probes and drug starting points (leads) from weak starting evidence, namely fragment hits. The hits must be chemically altered to improve their binding strength to the target protein, along with other properties.

The DSI Poised Library comprises 768 highly soluble fragments. Each compound is accompanied by its own virtual chemical space, which is readily accessible for synthesis and available for purchase through Enamine. Any hit from this library can be developed with follow-up chemistry within a maximum of three weeks using Enamine’s groundbreaking REAL database.