Selcia has recently widened its portfolio of skills to include a fully-fledged biology and screening unit. The highlight in 2009 was the introduction of an exciting new fragment screening technology using capillary electrophoresis (CE). This screening technology, initially developed for HTS applications, was acquired by Selcia and adapted for fragment screening. CEfrag (patent pending) offers a unique and robust screening tool with a number of significant advantages over existing fragment screening technologies.

2009 also saw Selcia design and build a high quality fragment library of approximately 1500 compounds that has a low overlap with other commercial fragment libraries and a high proportion of singletons.

All compounds in the Selcia Fragment Library have been carefully selected by Selcia scientists to meet ‘Rule-of-Three’ criteria, to be readily amenable to chemical manipulation and to be attractive from a medicinal chemistry perspective. The Selcia Fragment Library contains a 20% proportion of structures that form substructures in marketed drugs and all samples have undergone stringent QC analysis and solubility checks.

Both the Selcia Fragment library or the client’s library can be screened with the CEfrag Screen. The client may provide the target or Selcia can perform protein expression in-house.