LCGC

Lankenau Institute for Medical Research Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC)

What is LCGC?

LIMR Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC) is a biotech company that was created to fill a major gap in technology by providing access to large compound libraries for high-throughput screening. LCGC is efficiently storing and arraying millions of compounds that can be used to evaluate new drug targets.

Our Services

• Providing unique compound libraries in the orthogonally compressed or standard formats at very reasonable cost
• Providing virtual and material compound management services to academic labs and startups
• Consulting services on assay development, HTS and hit-to-lead guaranteed to measurably increase QC/QA and productivity for new leads discovery
• 100% satisfaction, money-back guarantee for all materials and services

Partner With Us

The LCGC is looking for partners to realize greater efficiency and productivity of drug discovery by:

• Adding Academic and Pharmaceutical compound libraries to our current 170,000 sample library as a shared resource
• Providing services at a no or reduced cost in exchange for milestone-gated downstream compensation
• Alleviating bottlenecks that prevent academic research scientists from contributing more successfully to new drug pipelines
• Reducing redundancy and waste in high by measurably increasing HTS efficiency by 500% or more
• Increasing collaboration between industry and academic centers of excellence
• Elevating success rates in pharmaceutical research and development with innovative and powerful six-sigma methodologies
• We are looking to out-license our innovative repository and other technologies

Our Infrastructure

The LCGC has established a powerful, automated molecular-diversity server called the NanoTube Automated Repository Server (NARS) that has a dynamic storage capacity of 10-million samples under a frozen dehumidified environment with a cherry-picking throughput of 10,000 samples per day. The NARS, which stores replicate ‘single-shot’ aliquots of 1-50 ml per individually-addressable storage container, can provide unparalleled, ultra-rapid access to the largest chemical libraries, without freeze thawing samples, which ensures preserving the integrity of the entire collection indefinitely

In addition to the NARS repository technology, LCGC has acquired a unique compound library of 170,000 members. Additionally, we have powder reserves of 10 mg each for 120,000 compounds. The file was acquired with a unique computational and ‘medicinal bias’ that differs from the typical approach. Around 120,000 of the total number of compounds pass all Lipinski and drug reactivity filters typically used in pharma to qualify drug-like libraries for high throughput screening (HTS). Creation of focused libraries may be easily accomplished for tens of thousands of compounds in days, rather than weeks, for lead-finding and lead-following research.

We are formatting the LCGC library by a method that allows abbreviated HTS, referred to as orthogonal compression of compound libraries (OCL), that may enable five-fold improvement in lead-finding ability compared with present practice in HTS. The approach pools the compounds contained on 100 microtiter plates into ten plates that are distributed across two independent dimensional arrays orthogonal to each other, which yields a total of only 20-plates, with each compound represented twice surrounded by nine different molecules in each assay well. Our approach is to prepare OCL on a set of only five (5) 384-well plates containing 8,000 compounds. The OCL methods extends the capacity of large scale screening enterprises and provides an entry point for smaller labs to complete high-throughput screens without large technology budgets. Published studies support that when properly applied, OCL can markedly reduce the resources required for successful HTS (Motlekar N, et al., Assay. Drug. Dev. Technol. (2008) 395-405; Ferrand S, et al., Assay Drug. Dev. Technol. (2005) 395-405). 

In collaboration with Chip Allee of CeuticalSoft, we have developed innovative software that extracts maximum value from the OCL method. Activity reports are written to spreadsheets in easy to manage table formats. The 10XY module can be run as stand-alone workbook with all the plate and compound data embedded for a single set of mixture plates or it can be run as a fully integrated database application with full access to large mixture plate collections.

In essence, what LCGC has accomplished is to put in place a multi-million dollar, drug discovery infrastructure and to make it all affordably available. Enhancing HTS efficiency to discover novel drug leads more quickly and reliably could represent a transformative contribution to the drug discovery field, especially for smaller laboratories at biotechnology startups and throughout academia.