Whether compounds are made individually or by parallel medicinal chemistry, the speed to analog creation relies, in part, on the speed to access diverse sets of monomers and templates (M&Ts) or building blocks (BBs). Speed to diversity is paramount in Drug Discovery. Companies often buy commercial BBs at risk or design “custom” or non-commercially available BBs to build a competitive advantage. However this “arms race” is proving non-sustainable as a business model: The number of commercially available BBs has grown exponentially in the last decade making the ownership of extensive, internal collection cost prohibitive. Really interesting BBs that contain novel heterocycles, chirality, fluorine, and/or bridged functionality, etc., tend to be more synthetically challenging to prepare, making the initial cost/gram very expensive. The emergence of technologies like DNA encoded libraries led to a demand for classes of BBs that were not existent a decade ago. New coupling technologies have the same effect. When BBs fall out of favor due to changes in drug target class or undesired activity (structural alerts, metabolic liability), they become stranded assets or a sunk cost to the organization. Pharma Companies have banded together to design novel BBs for shared use. One example of getting value from stranded BB assets is through gram-for-gram, 1-on-1 swapping events. However this approach still involves investment/selection at risk, may be limited by sample inventory, have high transaction costs for each swap, and may still lead to future, stranded assets. This talk will introduce a forum model that maximizes the speed to access diverse BBs, reduces the financial risk of BB acquisition and is compound efficient. Membership will be open to selected commercial suppliers offering novel BBs and to peer pharma companies willing to make novel, non-commercial BBs available.

Building block forum: A cost-effective business model to enhance access to diverse monomers and templates

254th National Meeting (2017)

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