An Interview With Life Chemicals

Life Chemicals is a leading supplier of novel high-throughput screening (HTS) compounds and a premium provider of custom synthesis and computational chemistry services.

To learn more about the company and the services it provides, Technology Networks spoke with Olga Balabon, head of corporate marketing. In this interview, Olga also highlights how the company supports researchers when searching for appropriate product candidates.

Anna MacDonald (AM): Can you tell me more about Life Chemicals and the services you provide?

Olga Balabon (OB): Life Chemicals is a fully integrated platform for early drug discovery. Our highly qualified R&D team specializes in fine organic synthesis, including custom synthesis, cheminformatics and screening library design.

Currently, our proprietary compound collection comprises over 510,000 drug-like screening compounds, 51,000 fragments and 12,500 building blocks.

To address the rising popularity of synthetically-feasible virtual screening compound libraries for drug discovery, Life Chemicals offers a collection of tangible screening compounds that can open up boundless horizons for users of virtual libraries and discoverers of new products.

Novel chemical entities are being constantly added to the company’s HTS collection, with unique targeted and focused libraries being developed by our cheminformatics team to apply the whole arsenal of advanced computational methods.

AM: What sets Life Chemicals apart?

OB: The company is internationally recognized by academic and industrial professionals worldwide and can offer more than 25 years of expertise in medicinal chemistry.

We have earned a strong position on the market owing to our in-house chemistry, so all designing and synthesis of our collection of small molecules is performed in-house in our laboratories.

We put a strong focus on higher drug-likeness and guaranteed purity of synthesized compounds, and high re-supply rate. Life Chemicals HTS products can be formatted according to the customer’s requirements to be promptly delivered worldwide.

The company’s state-of-the-art synthetic capacities where our bright teams carry on ingenious and pioneering research and production enable us to expand the catalog annually with over 25,000 original compounds.

Recently, we put a lot of attention in the development of in vitro ADMET testing inside the company in order to support early drug discovery further in loco.

AM: What challenges do researchers face when searching for appropriate product candidates, and how does Life Chemicals help?

OB: Researchers often seek to deliver novel structures, which would cover broader chemical spaces. So, something that is not widely available or already tested. Here our company steps in, as many of the compounds synthesized by Life Chemicals are unique and not available in other commercial catalogs.

We are always ready to offer efficient and timely solutions to the majority of problems in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry and agrochemistry. In particular, Life Chemicals is proud of its successful experience in custom synthesis projects of high complexity, including multistep procedures based on cutting-edge techniques, such as flow chemistry, microwave-assisted synthesis and photochemistry. The company has got rare and very specialized equipment for handling highly toxic and flammable reagents.

Our multidisciplinary teams have been involved in full-time equivalent (FTE)/contract synthesis and contract research organization (CRO) services for life sciences and industries. They carry out the rational design of screening libraries with in silico predicted affinity to the customer’s target protein, combinatorial and parallel synthesis for high-throughput R&D. Also, it should be mentioned that we perform synthesis of reference compounds, scaffold-based compound libraries, impurities and metabolites.

Furthermore, our facilities and expertise enable the company to support long-term projects confidently which can require process optimization and scale-up.

AM: How do you ensure compounds are high quality?

OB: We provide very rigorous quality control to guarantee over 90% purity of our products, as confirmed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and/or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy data, with their electronic files being available for our customers upon request. Moreover, we provide a wide array of advanced and customizable quality assurance services on demand.

Olga Balabon was speaking to Anna MacDonald, Science Writer for Technology Networks.