Alchemia teams with Belgian screening company

Australian company Alchemia has begun a drug discovery collaboration with Belgium's Euroscreen.

Alchemia will provide Euroscreen with a library of low molecular weight compounds designed using its proprietary VAST (Versatile Assembly on Sugar Templates) technology. Euroscreen will screen the library for ligands that activate G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), using its Aequoscreen cell-based screening technology.

GPCRs are cell surface receptors implicated in the pathophysiology of a multiplicity of diseases and disease states.

Euroscreen's R&D vice-president, Dr Richard White, said GPCRs represented 30 per cent of all targets being pursued for drug discovery today by research teams around the world.

"There are still over 100 human GPCRs in the human genome which have not had their natural ligand or function discovered to date (orphan receptors)," he said.

Alchemia CEO Dr Tracie Ramsdale said the company was looking forward to the Euroscreen collaboration.

"[Euroscreen] has such a rich source of GPCR testing capabilities," she said.

Ramsdale said that together, the companies would optimise leads and potentially discover drug candidates for important human diseases.

The companies hope to identify some lead compounds in the next one to two years, which can then be taken into pre-clinical trials, according to Ramsdale.

Although Alchemia and Euroscreen will probably do some of the pre-clinical and proof-of-concept studies, the companies plan to out-license any discoveries to larger pharmaceutical companies for further development and commercialisation, she said.