Since 2019, we have been participating in the Fragalysis project, which is one of the most important projects in our portfolio.
In cooperation with the University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source Ltd. company we are developing web application that helps scientists accelerate drug development through the chemical compound screening.
Fragalysis is a web based platform on the cloud for fragment-based drug discovery. This approach is used to discover new drugs at an early stage. X-ray crystallography is one of the first biophysical techniques that can be used to collect chemical screenings due to its accuracy and speed.
The device from Diamond company, a full X-ray screening experiment, has now been implemented as a highly efficient process, allowing up to 1000 compounds to be screened individually in less than a week and the process covers soaking, harvesting, automatic data collection, and data analysis. Fragment libraries are available, though users can bring their own and determine the compatibility of individual chemical compounds. This type of data is used for the early stages of drug discovery, where pieces of molecules come together that can eventually form a drug-like molecule. The data are processed by top computational scientists, for whom Fragalysis greatly simplifies work with fragments of chemical compounds.
Fragalysis team
Frank von Delft
Professor of Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, Head of the Protein Crystallography Department of the SRF Center for Drug Discovery, founder of Covid Moonshot, currently actively researching the development of antiviral drugs.
Boris Kovář
The developer at M2M Solutions, s.r.o., currently working as a frontend developer for a drug discovery tool that is used to analyze protein-ligand interactions.
Project financing
Thanks to all the donors and sponsors the Fragalysis app comes from the demo app to the real web platform, which can be used by scientists from all over the world and participate on the drug development. Today, the data is available to anyone with experience and expertise in cutting-edge computing tools and science.
Evaluation of the processing results on the platform is charged.
Janssen
The largest financial partner is the Belgian company Janssen, which is one of the most important innovation centers and part of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical companies. The company combines expertise, skills and partnerships in the development, research, production and marketing of new drugs worldwide.
Diamond
Diamond Light Source is a not-for-profit limited company funded as a joint venture between UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and Wellcome Trust.
Primarily it is the UK’s national synchrotron, together with cryo-electron microscopy at the Harwell site, which are available to researchers through a competitive application process, provided that the published results are publicly available.
More than 14,000 scientists from around the world and physical sciences from academia and industry use Diamond to conduct experiments with the help of approximately 700 employees.
University of Oxford
The oldest British university, which is one of the world leaders in terms of education, development and research. Despite the difficulty of studying, up to 99% of students complete this university with a degree acceptable for the international standards.