Melvin Reichman

An aim of translational research in universities is to discover novel chemical probes having the attributes of true drug lead candidates that are suitable for preclinical development to deliver first-in-class medicines in areas of high unmet medical need. Universities have long desired, but have rarely obtained, broad access to the libraries considered the 'crown jewels' of the pharmaceutical industry. The Lankenau Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC) has established a totally new, high-capacity storage and distribution center for public and private chemical collections. We are capable of dynamically storing and rapidly retrieving up to 10-million compounds in DMSO stock
solutions from a dehumidified freezer based on automated storage and retrieval technology we recently developed, validated and patented (US Patent 7632467).

For the first time ever, pharmaceutical companies will provide open but appropriately protected access to their diversity-clustered smart-snapshots (DCSS), which represent millions of drug-like small molecules from vast proprietary chemical collections that have been compiled over decades with medicinal and cheminformatic arts. The DCSS libraries are specially formatted to protect all intellectual property, while enabling HTS to proceed with 500% greater efficiency than prevailing drug screening practices. The talk will present the details of a totally new resource-sharing model that brings scientists from Academia and Big Pharma together in a new way, under a symbiotically transformative, new public-private partnering paradigm.