Drug Discovery and Development
The number of pharmaceutical compounds derived from natural products is immense. Searching for new lead structures is increasingly causing a bottleneck in the pharmaceutical industry's drug discovery operations. Natural products provide a rich reservoir of structural diversity, which are additionally biologically validated. Natural products are developed from their interaction with partially highly specific enzymes/proteins - their high biological interaction potential is undisputed.


AnalytiCon has innovated natural product-based compound screening!
Efficient natural product-based compound screening from reliable access to natural resources up to development candidates places special demands on expertise and technological equipment! Thanks to new technologies, the use of chemoinformatic tools and a lean NP-specific organization, natural product-based compound screening is different at AnalytiCon - and therefore less complicated. Only a few teams worldwide have the critical mass to execute all steps efficiently and in-house, from the fermentation up to the complex synthesis and development. AnalytiCon Discovery with its 60 employees belongs to the top five natural product drug discovery teams worldwide.
AnalytiCon's Uniqueness/Track Record
  • AnalytiCon is the worldwide leading supplier of natural product-based concepts in compound research. The company is backed by 20 years successful co-operation with 60 companies from the pharmaceutical industry, including Johnson&Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, Genentech, Amgen and Takeda.
  • In 200 screening campaigns to date, natural products and natural product-based semi-synthetic substance libraries have so far produced hit rates between 0.01 and 5.1%, the average currently being 1.3%. More than 90% of the primary hits were confirmed in confirmation assays with de novo produced substances. Nowadays, NATx and MEGx belong in every well-sorted substance library also due to the huge diversity of structures.
  • 20 employees are working on the synthetic optimization of natural products, from early SAR libraries up to complete hit-to-lead programs to optimize the effect, stability, pharmacology as well as the IP position. This takes place at a speed which is breath-taking for natural product-based compound research. In a total of ten cases, less than 9 months after the primary hit, 10-50g of a compound optimized over several rounds could be supplied for initial in-vivo experiments.
  • In several projects, some of which have been published* (!), AnalytiCon has not only proven the successful symbiosis of natural-product and synthesis chemistry, but also of natural product and computer chemistry. This includes the use of virtual screenings for an efficient compound search as well as the use of initial hits to open up new structure options using scaffold-hopping strategies.