CRT’s Discovery Laboratories

CRT's Discovery Laboratories (DL) translate academic discoveries into industrial propositions. Sourcing novel targets or novel biology from an exclusive world class academic pipeline, the DL has an active project portfolio of 15 projects. Major partnerships with AstraZeneca and Cephalon represent significant milestones in the development and reputation of the Discovery Laboratories.

Research & Discovery

At CRT our partnerships with research institutes and funding bodies, and exclusive rights to Cancer Research UK funded programmes give us access to over $500m of research ideas and exciting early stage discoveries.

Validation & Feasibility

Extensive validation and feasibility studies are applied to all potential therapeutics and drug discovery targets to identify promising validated targets. Target validation studies utilise CRT Discovery Laboratories comprehensive normal and tumour collections of human cDNA and established experience in RNA Interference technology.

Assay/HTS

CRT Discovery Laboratories offer the development of robust, industrially-applicable, automated biochemical and cellular drug discovery assays, allied with large scale protein expression and purification to perform high throughput screening. Hits are generated from CRT's library of more than 100,000 drug-like compounds, including 10,000 kinase-directed compounds.

Hit-to-Lead/Lead Optimisation

Lead series are developed from initial hits by CRT's industrially trained team of medicinal chemists and pharmacologists. The functional activity of biological is investigated in a series of specialist assays. Lead candidates are optimised for potency and drug-like characteristics and having the ability to demonstrate activity against the target with a PD biomarker is important to us. Our aim during lead optimisation is to demonstrate Proof-of-Principle.

Commercialisation

It is our aim to identify a partner for these programmes at or before in vivo proof-of-principle.