Preparative Separation of Mixtures by Mass Spectrometry

Introduction With the average development cost for new pharmaceutical products in the hundreds of millions and continuing to increase, there is a pressing need to identify successful therapeutic compounds at the earliest stage possible. Combinatorial chemistry provides the drug discovery process with a valuable tool for generating new leads but tools are required to rapidly and accurately screen the large libraries of new compounds that are generated. Technology description The inventors have developed a mass-spectroscopy tool that permits the selective isolation of small molecules of interest from combinatorial chemistry libraries before additional functional screening is carried out. The benefits are two-fold; one, to lower the false positive rates from screening before the hits are re-synthesized or scaled up to confirm the hit and two, to reduce the number of false negatives generated from impurity toxicities. Business opportunity Mass Spectrometry is an established tool in the drug discovery process. Combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening represent substantial overall market opportunities, with Frost and Sullivan estimating the overall market for combinatorial chemistry tools at more than $500 million and the overall opportunity for high throughput supplies and instrumentation at more than $3 billion. The Business Communications Company estimates the US market for mass spectroscopy at greater than $500 million per year. Stage of development A fully functioning prototype is able to run small molecule samples.

Patents:
US 6,750,448

Type of Offer: Licensing



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