Drug Discovery

Dompé farmaceutici has seized the potential of bioinformatics by developing various platforms, such as Exscalate (EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns), that leverage powerful supercomputers. This technological investment, consolidated over the years, has transformed our drug discovery process—making it more efficient to develop personalized therapies based on the characteristics of individual patients, especially in disease states that still face an unmet therapeutic needs.

Exscalate platform

Exscalate is a drug discovery platform boasting a library of compounds composed of 500 billion molecules, which can be evaluated at the rate of three million per second for each new target. In parallel to the library-based screening, we have developed an alternative drug repurposing process. The purpose of Exscalate is to identify molecules and compounds with structural characteristics capable of interacting with specific cell receptors to trigger specific biological activities. The software we use also allows us to design new molecules following the rules of rational drug design to obtain compounds capable of interacting specifically with a tissue or regulating the biological activity of a cell or a protein through specific receptors. Our supercomputing resources allow Exscalate to conduct simultaneous screening on several drugs, paving the way for a polypharmacological approach to the pathologies through multiple targets or disease pathways.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Exscalate has driven the launch of Exscalate4CoV (E4C) project. This consortium, led by Dompé, includes 18 top public and private research institutions and centers, from seven different European countries, supported by the European Commission, under the Horizon 2020 framework program. E4C has used the platform to develop new drugs against Covid-192.

Hit-to-Lead (H2L)

Molecules selected in the HTS phase as having better in vitro activity than others are called hit compounds. Before being directed to clinical trials, these molecules undergo a further selection, which lasts approximately six to nine months, to verify that they are also selective molecules for the target of interest and that they have chemical-physical and pharmacokinetic characteristics suitable for the intended therapeutic purpose (for example, solubility). In this way, the most promising compounds, called lead compounds, are identified and sent to the next validation phase. The molecules that pass all the tests, indicated as lead candidates can finally be sent to the clinical phase 1 stage and beyond