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 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…

Just as good quality data is essential to draw the right conclusions from experiments, so are good quality compounds. There are many ways to assess compound quality and one technique we regularly use for this purpose at ZoBio is NMR.
We start by dissolving incoming compounds in d6-DMSO to generate stock solutions for use in various assays. The advantage of using d6-DMSO is that the same stock can not only be used for biochemical and SPR assays, but also for ligand- or protein observed NMR. This way, we reduce batch to batch variance…