Integrated Drug Discovery at Cambridge
Charles River Discovery’s site in Chesterford Park, UK believes in an integrated approach to drug discovery. Our partners can draw on experienced medicinal and synthetic chemists, biologists, structural biologists, DMPK experts, in vivo pharmacologists, and formulation specialists, operating from state-of-the-art laboratories in multidisciplinary teams.
We provide drug discovery services covering a spectrum from small, single-discipline projects to fully integrated programs involving biology, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutics, structural biology, and DMPK. Continued scientific leadership during the transition from discovery to development ensures the deployment of our expert teams for optimal impact and reduces downtime for partners as their programs progress.
Laboratory Details
Location
Charles River has a center of excellence for integrated drug discovery located at Chesterford Research Park (founded as BioFocus in 1997 and acquired by Charles River in 2014). This site is in the South Cambridgeshire Biotech Cluster, close to Stansted airport and less than an hour away from both London and Cambridge.
Virtual Site Tour - Chesterford Research Park
Explore our virtual tour of this research site focused on integrated drug discovery, and gain a deeper understanding of how your programs could be further advanced through Charles River.
See Virtual Tour
Specifications
- Approximately 112,000 square feet of laboratory space
- Approximately 400 scientific staff
Typical Projects
- Target elucidation
- Target validation
- Assay development
- Biomarker development
- Hit identification
- Hit validation
- Hit-to-lead
- Lead optimization
- Late-stage optimization to candidate nomination
- Proteomics
- Bioinformatics
Integrated Drug Discovery Service Areas
- ADME/DMPK
- Analytical chemistry and automated purification
- Automated purification
- Biochemical and cellular assay development and screening
- Blood work - immunology
- Capture compound mass spectrometry
- CAT II containment
- Cell line generation
- Compound libraries
- Computational chemistry - CADD
- CRISPR
- Electrophysiology, automated and manual
- Formulation sciences, including inhaled delivery
- Fragment library screening
- High-throughput screening (HTS)
- Human blood donor panel and immunology
- Human primary cell biology (over 120 human primary cell assays across all therapeutic areas)
- In Vitro drug discovery
- Medicinal chemistry
- Molecular biology
- Pharmaceutics and solid state chemistry
- Pharmacodynamic biomarker analysis
- Proteomics
- Scale-up chemistry
- Stem cell/iPSC
- Structural biology and biophysical screening
- Synthetic chemistry, including kilo scale-up
- Target validation
Proven Track Record in Drug Discovery
We have identified over 100 candidates for partner organizations covering a wide variety of therapeutic areas:
- Anti-bacterial
- Anti-viral
- Cardiovascular disease
- CNS
- Gastrointestinal
- Inflammation
- Metabolic disease
- Oncology
- Rare and orphan disease
- Respiratory disease