NovAliX has announced a €5.3M ($6.4M) investment in its DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) platform, which is set up at NovAliX headquarters as part of an eight-year technological cooperation agreement signed with a global pharmaceutical group.
This new investment will be used to up-scale the DEL production platform; to design and synthesize highly valuable libraries by using new chemoinformatic tools.
NovA-DEL is an automation and informatics driven solution for the design, production and affinity selection of DELs. It is built on the concept of capturing and tracking the experimental information in the library synthesis and the affinity selection as it is generated. This information is used to direct the laboratory instrumentation, maximizing scientific productivity and enhancing the overall quality of DEL processes. Scientific productivity and DEL quality are further improved by automating sample handling, analytical data gathering and processing tasks.
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The company recently recruited highly regarded medicinal chemists from a number of pharmaceutical companies. They will be tasked with spearheading the DEL-based drug discovery programs, particularly within the anti-infective and oncology fields.
“For over a decade, we have been honing our skills in chemical biology screening techniques, especially with micro-array-based surface plasmon resonance, combining them with our strong in-house biophysical capabilities. Going forwards, the DEL platform will be the benchmark in our screening techniques,” said Denis Zeyer, CEO of NovAliX. “This agreement, signed with a major pharmaceutical company, enables us to enter the field with a fully-fledged and automated platform, which we now can offer to our clients.”
In drug discovery, DNA-encoded libraries represent a novel and robust approach to hit identification that can provide access to a set of diverse chemotypes at a significantly lower cost per point than that of high-throughput screening (HTS).