Conformetrix: catalysing drug discovery
Spin-out company Conformetrix, created by a University of Manchester researcher with funding from BBSRC, is helping pharmaceutical companies speed up their drug discovery pipeline and identify potential new drugs.
Data breakout
| 15 years | Typical time for company to develop a new drug |
|---|---|
| £4.4Bn | Amount pharmaceutical industry spent on research and development in 2009 |
| 10-100 | Increase in the amount of data used by Conformetrix’s approach |
Drug discovery is expensive and time-consuming. The platform technology developed by former BBSRC David Phillips Fellow Dr Andrew Almond and Dr Charles Blundell, the research assistant on Almond’s fellowship grant, is making the process of drug discovery faster, more accurate and cheaper. It uses Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR, the technology behind MRI scanning) data in a novel way to study small molecules in solution.
Almond’s company, Conformetrix, has recently signed a research collaboration agreement with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to use Almond’s technology across their pre-clinical drug discovery programme. Conformetrix has also worked with other pharmaceutical companies from around the world.
The work was funded by a David Phillips fellowship, followed by two Follow-on Funding grants to refine the technology, and an Enterprise Fellowship.
Read the full impact evidence report (PDF 293KB).
Image: Conformetrix