The Science and Technology behind Design Pharma

Natural products are an almost inexhaustible reservoir of small molecules invented by nature and optimized by evolution to have drug-like properties. Important therapeutics are derived from natural product scaffolds, including drugs for cancer chemotherapy, anti-infectives, immunosuppressants, or anesthetics. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing and computational analysis suggest that the vast majority of natural products remain undiscovered.

Not surprisingly, some aspects of human health are affected by such secondary metabolites, which are derived from bacteria and food components, produced by the host and biochemically modified by gut bacteria, as well as by secondary metabolites formed de novo by gut microbes.?

Deciphering the communication between the microbiota and human physiology provides access to various chemical entities that represent interesting targets for drug development. Understanding the mode of action of secondary metabolite chemistry in the context of influencing, for example, inflammatory processes and the complex modulation of immune responses in disease or treatment of disease represents a major unmet need for the development of better therapeutics.

Design Pharmaceuticals is the first company to offer a drug discovery platform that integrates a suite of unrivaled technology modules to source, discover, identify and manufacture new chemical entities from nature’s chemistry at unprecedented scale and speed.Read the recent?Nature Reviews Genetics?publication by Marnix Medema, co-founder of Design Pharmaceuticals, titled "Mining genomes to illuminate the specialized chemistry of life" about computational approaches to effectively biomine chemicals from natural resources: