WOBURN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aphios Corporation today announced that it was awarded an SBIR grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), NIH to design and develop instrumentation for its green drug discovery technology.
The majority of new chemical entities (NCEs), including anticancer drugs and anti-infectives approved by regulatory authorities, over the last few decades were based on natural products isolated from terrestrial plants and microorganisms. Despite these statistics, many pharmaceutical companies have eliminated their natural products research. This shift was made to explore the promise of high-throughput screening of mass-produced combinatorial libraries against the many disease targets that have been developed as a result of the explosion of biologic and genetic information, and the sequencing of the human genome. This paradigm shift has not resulted in the expected surge in productivity in the discovery pipeline. This decline in productivity is partially caused by the shift from screening natural products molecules that have been honed by millions of years of evolutionary development to screening simple organic structures that can be readily manipulated by combinatorial chemistry. This paradigm shift from natural to synthetic was also partially driven by the difficulties associated with the discovery of bioactive natural molecules.
Help employers find you! Check out all the jobs and post your resume.
