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Drug discovery doesn’t sleep, and neither does our SPR (Surface Plasmon Resonance) team. While the Assay Group takes a well-deserved weekend break and goes for dinner tonight, our relentless SPR team is tirelessly screening compounds, revealing critical insights that help drive discovery forward.
Meet the Team:
Each of our SPR machines brings unique strengths to the lab, earning their names and personalities for how they support our research. These workhorses are the true heroes of our lab, capturing precise data…
Molecular Glues Discovery
Molecular glues have emerged as an exciting new class of agents in drug discovery, offering a novel mechanism to modulate protein function, both as protein degraders and for other therapeutic targets. Unlike traditional drugs that inhibit or block protein activity, molecular glues enhance or induce new protein-protein interactions (PPIs), allowing them to activate biological pathways rather than suppressing them. For instance, the natural compound Rapamycin has been used as an immunosuppressant for decades. It binds at the interface of mTOR and FKBP12 and increases the interaction between these two proteins…
Positive Impact of Dragonfly™ Discovery in Biochemical Assay
Biochemical assays are commonly used to assess how organic compounds impact the activity of a protein of interest (POI). ZoBio frequently employs biochemical assays to validate compounds that have been identified as interacting with the POI through orthogonal biophysical assays like Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). To enhance the efficiency and reliability of the biochemical assay workflow, ZoBio has purchased a Dragonfly™ Discovery, a valuable tool known for its ability to significantly improve assay performance by facilitating high-throughput…
Smoothening the Bumpy Road of Covalent Drug Discovery with Protein NMR
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the use of covalent compounds in small molecule drug discovery. Much of this interest has been driven by the success of covalent compounds for “undruggable” targets such as kRAS. While it is relatively easy to buy or build a library of cysteine reactive compounds and screen them using mass spectrometry (MS), does this really provide all the information to decide whether a “hit” is a good starting point for a drug discovery campaign?
Typically, a covalent campaign starts with screening a library for conjugation…