Focus on Medicinal Chemistry
& Drug Discovery

CanAm Bioresearch is primarily a company supporting medicinal chemistry research for drug discovery projects. It does not run the entire medicinal chemistry program itself but provides the synthetic organic chemistry expertise to support the SAR (structure activity relationship) of research programs at the stages of hit-to-lead and lead optimization, including large scale batches to enable early toxicology studies.

Hit Identification and Confirmation

CanAm Bioresearch chemists can quickly and effectively re-synthesize hits from bibliographic data, early screening or in-silico hit identification, by using reported synthetic routes or designing efficient new ones, in order to confirm the biological activity of the selected hits and kick-start your med-chem campaign.

Hit to Lead Generation

Served by an extensive collection of building blocks, CanAm Bioresearch is a CRO that can move very rapidly on generating libraries of compounds with structural diversity. These building block collections have been hand-picked to ensure drug-like properties for the ensuing bio-active molecules.

Lead Optimization

The very high level of synthetic organic chemistry at CanAm Bioresearch allows the contracting medicinal chemist to understand and follow the SAR results analysis to design potential drug molecules with complex and constrained structures, if needed. This superior control of synthesis gives access to large unexplored areas of the molecular structures. This ability is a clear advantage for biotech, pharmaceutical, or other life-science companies when it comes to patenting their potential drugs.

Medicinal Chemistry Expertise

CanAm Bioresearch has successfully fulfilled contracts with pharmaceutical companies to their complete satisfaction. We have completed projects in oncology, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and CNS. Multiple drug candidates developed in collaboration with our clients have entered clinical trials.

Whether you are starting a new drug discovery program or needing extra help in expediting your discovery efforts, our dedicated chemistry team is here to help.

Fast-track your Drug Discovery Program

CanAm Bioresearch Medicinal Chemistry Capability & Capacity

  • Experts at designing new synthetic routes for novel chemistry and can rapidly reproduce literature routes when available

  • Chemists routinely handle compound complexity of 5-10 step synthetic routes

  • Extensive experience in custom organic synthesis, including stable isotope synthesis and fluorescent tag labeling

  • Skilled in chemical synthesis of building blocks, key intermediates, reference active compound, constrained complex analogs, analytical standards and pre-clinical drug candidate

  • Extensive building block collections maintained in house

  • Experience in hit to lead generation and optimization

    • Early hits validation

    • Lead optimization

    • Compound libraries using our in-house building block collections of hundreds of reagents

    • Advanced lead optimization by individual target molecule synthesis

    • Evolution of structure-activity relationship (SAR)

  • Synthesis of compounds of interest from 10 mg up to multigram scale

  • Compound purity and integrity: final submitted compounds are routinely characterized using 1H-NMR (along with 13C, 19F and/or 31P NMR if necessary), MS and HPLC. Purity of >95% (by NMR, HPLC or LC-MS) is commonly achieved for final compounds (higher purity can be obtained if requested)

  • Medicinal chemistry project leadership available

Successfully Complete your Med-Chem Campaign

Scale-up Synthesis

CanAm has the ability to run intermediate scale-up synthesis of key intermediates or lead compounds for non-GMP pre-clinical studies up to 500-gram scale. It has experience doing so on past projects for advanced key intermediates and drug candidates.

Technical Transfer

CanAm chemists have experience in optimization of R&D synthetic routes into successful process routes for technical transfer to a CMO for non-GMP and GMP process manufacturing. In a recent project, the R&D 10-step route was optimized by reducing the amount of reagents and solvents used, replacing carcinogenic or high-boiling point solvents whenever possible, and finding alternative purification methods to silica gel chromatography (crystallization, selective precipitation/solubility, acid-base work-up). Eventually, the process-optimized route was successfully transferred to the CMO who used it with minor changes in order to produce the drug candidate on a GMP 400g-scale for use in clinical trials. Regular open communication was held between CanAm and the CMO during the whole process to ensure best transfer of technical information and knowledge.

Patent Application Dossier Writing

CanAm chemists are knowledgeable and experienced in patent writing and can help with the synthetic experimental procedures and compound characterization data.