San Francisco, USA, and Kyiv, Ukraine, March 6 2023. OpenBench, the first success-driven service for small molecule hit discovery, and Enamine, the world’s leading provider of astronomical numbers of compounds for biological screening, today announced the extension of their collaboration to enrich global early discovery efforts.
Conventional hit discovery is filled with uncertainty. OpenBench alleviates this uncertainty by offering a success-driven service model whereby OpenBench’s collaborators only pay for experimentally confirmed hits. OpenBench creates this opportunity by itself bearing the cost and scientific risk of virtually screening billions of molecules, synthesizing the highest scoring compounds, and testing samples for bioactivity. This pioneering, success-driven business model depends heavily on the ability to quickly and cost-effectively source diverse and high quality chemical material. Enamine is the perfect partner for the job, having developed the world’s largest and ever-expanding commercial database of virtual compounds, the REAL Database, counting now over 6.5 billion compounds. Backed up by a tremendous synthesis success rate exceeding 80%, these compounds represent an ideal virtual screening library for OpenBench’s advanced computational platform.
The companies have collaborated since 2021. A new agreement involves synthesizing up to 50,000 REAL Compounds for multiple hit-finding campaigns through 2023. OpenBench will leverage its proprietary AI-based screening techniques to drive compound selection and Enamine will synthesize selected compounds within just 3-4 weeks and deliver them to OpenBench’s partner labs in a pre-defined format adapted to the demands of the applicable assay protocol.
“OpenBench’s innovative success-driven research model is quite appealing,” said Michael Bossert, Head of Strategic Alliances at Enamine. He continued, “Early discovery efforts typically require substantial resource investment. OpenBench's success-driven principle makes sure such resources go towards promising new preclinical compounds. Their track record of success proves that our REAL Database is abounding with hits just waiting to be identified and confirmed”.
“We are grateful to work with a synthetic partner as innovative, resilient, and reliable as Enamine,” said OpenBench Chief Scientific Officer Lewis Martin. He continued, “Enamine’s commitment to superior customer service, speed, and sample quality is unparalleled. Without their pioneering work in ultra-large readily accessible library development, our success-driven approach would not be possible.”