Making Science Click - The idea behind SciClix
Back in 2013, right at the onset of my job as a medicinal chemist, I found myself in a checkmate situation wherein replacement of a 1,4-disubstituted phenyl ring was proving to be a major roadblock for the synthetic endeavour at hand. The lead compound that I was working with did a ‘fantastic job’ in vitro but failed miserably in vivo and the aforementioned phenyl ring was the undisputed culprit. At the time of despair, a twisted looking molecular building-block published by Pfizer caught my eye and I desperately wanted to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, it was neither commercially available nor was it easy to make. To make a long and rather painful story short, I focused the next 5 years of my career in synthesizing potentially useful but commercially unavailable building-blocks as the main theme of my research. During this time, my team not only focused on the discovering new routes to such building-blocks, but also on understanding their biological significance.
By 2018, several organic research groups jumped into the fray and it was great to see that I could take it easy on the synthetic front. That meant we now had time to test our novel-motif hypothesis in early drug-discovery. I will write about this at a suitable time, but in essence we were positively surprised to see that our understanding of the structural and biological properties of these building blocks translated well during our preclinical endeavour. We basically barged through IND-enabling phase in less than a year. Clearly, the novel motif notion had worked as expected, and our hypothesis had its first proof-of-concept. It was now time to chart the unknown territory for others to follow and our vision was simple “to catalyse a paradigm shift in molecular design and synthesis.” We would like to bring new molecular building-blocks into the mainstream discovery process.
History shows that scientific inventions click the best when they are propelled as a business. And hence we decided to start our mission “to go beyond the frontiers of traditional chemical space” by incorporating a business venture – SciClix. This commercial venture will have science at its core, while also making sure that business aspects are given a realistic consideration. SciClix will bring new building-blocks to chemists at a reasonable cost. The idea also is to assure the chemist of scalable supply of these new motifs. Medicinal chemists for example, can propose a lab-to-bedside endeavour without worrying of “is this building-block scalable?” interrogation. If you see a compound that we have advertised in our brochure, then be assured that we can scale it.
SciClix aims at organic development. However, we also believe that there is no such thing as ‘one-man army’ in science or business, especially when the objective is to cause a major paradigm shift. So, if you are a researcher who believes in our mission and vision, we invite you to join forces. Get in touch, join the mission, let’s make science click!