IRL and Epichem form Australasian alliance

Industrial Research (IRL) and Epichem have announced a strategic alliance designed to provide clients with continuous and seamless services from drug discovery to cGMP production.

The two parties to this memorandum of understanding are both providers of high quality products and services in the area of organic chemistry and possess complementary skills, which will combine to better serve the Australasian pharmaceuticals market.

“It’s important that we make the best use of the capabilities in our region in order to drive biotechnology company development,” says IRL General Manager of Industrial Biotechnologies Dr Richard Furneaux.

IRL’s Carbohydrate Chemistry and GlycoSyn teams have built a world class reputation since 1984 in the chemical synthesis of carbohydrate active pharmaceutical intermediates (APIs), specialist fine chemicals, multi-step small molecule chemistry, dendrimer and peptide chemistry and drug development.

Epichem, with laboratories in Western Australia and Victoria, is an established supplier of products and services in the field of synthetic and medicinal chemistry, in particular specialising in aromatic and heterocyclic chemistry and the design and synthesis of analog libraries using parallel chemistry. Epichem also supplies a range of API impurity, degradant and metabolite standards.

“IRL and Epichem Pty Ltd have complementary expertise that is valuable for biotechnology companies in taking their products forward for commercialisation,” says Dr Furneaux.

The alliance’s first collaborative project involves the use of chiral scaffolds in the construction of drug discovery libraries.

“We have a chiral pharmaceuticals FRST programme, co-funded by New Zealand Pharmaceuticals Ltd (NZP), and together we have created a range of chiral scaffolds that can be used in creating drug discovery libraries,” says Dr Furneaux. “Epichem has capability in making these libraries and together we can produce a demonstration of their utility in biological systems.”