Founded in 2013, BioAscent is part of the BioCity group, and located within the BioCity Scotland site at Newhouse, Scotland, UK.
BioAscent operates within a former Organon / Schering-Plough / Merck Sharpe & Dohme R&D facility. The facility supports both Integrated Drug Discovery and Automated Compound Management & Logistics.
Drug Discovery Services
BioAscent’s integrated drug discovery services are delivered by a team of expert biologists and medicinal and computational chemists co-located in the state-of-the-art biology and chemistry laboratories of the former Merck Sharpe and Dohme R&D site at Newhouse, Scotland.
Our experience spans multiple therapy areas and all target classes. We can support each key stage of the drug discovery process. Expertise and capabilities include de novo assay generation, assay optimization and miniaturization; tailored hit discovery approaches including fragment, focused, and diversity-based high-throughput screening; through to hits-to-lead and lead optimization.
Compound Management Services
Our Compound Management team comprises the highly skilled management, scientists and technicians who commissioned and managed the facility since its establishment in 2005.
The compound storage facility was initially responsible for delivering compounds to the Organon screening sites at Newhouse and Oss (The Netherlands), in addition to varied research partners.
The facility was dramatically expanded after acquisition of Organon by Schering Plough, to become the global repository site for the company. The facility successfully supported all drug discovery operations in Europe, the US, and Asia.
Centre of Excellence for European Lead Factory
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funded European Lead Factory (ELF) was launched on the 7th February 2013, with BioAscent selected as the “centre of excellence” for the Compound Management activities of the consortium, with responsibility for the collection, storage, distribution, HTS logistics (hit picking, support of follow-up studies) and inventory management of the Joint European Compound Library (JECL).
We were able to recommission the facility and associated IT systems in order to deliver the compound management and logistics services for the European Lead Factory.
As part of the ELF, we work closely with the European Screening Centre, which is co-located with BioAscent at Biocity Scotland. This team provides biological data, medicinal chemistry, informatics analysis and modelling to the consortium. The group offers extensive knowledge of the drug discovery cycle over a wide range of target classes.
Read more about this collaboration.