SYNthesis med chem, a global contract research organisation (CRO) offering synthetic and medicinal chemistry services, has opened a new facility at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK.

The facility adds UK-based medicinal-chemistry expertise to the organisation and will provide SYNthesis’s growing roster of European customers with local project management for all of its synthetic and medicinal chemistry projects, the company said.

Formed in 2007, SYNthesis is Australian-owned and combines medicinal-chemistry expertise located at the company’s laboratories in Melbourne, Australia (and now Cambridge) with flexible, cost-effective synthetic-chemistry expertise sourced from its operations in Shanghai, China.

Management team

The SYNthesis management team comprises drug-discovery professionals with expertise across a range of targets – in particular, kinases, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and epigenetic targets.

Co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer Professor Andrew Wilks was previously chief scientific officer and founder of Cytopia. Before that, he worked at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Melbourne, where he discovered the JAK kinases.

Dr Xian Bu, co-founder and managing director of SYNthesis operations, including the company’s wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary in Shanghai, is a former vice president of the Chinese chemistry-service company SynCores and was a senior drug discovery scientist at Cytopia.  

European customer base

With a growing customer base across Europe, “it was essential that we put in place the infrastructure and resources to deliver the required levels of support for all our medicinal and synthetic chemistry projects”, Wilks commented.

“The new Cambridge facility does that, but also gives us the capacity to grow as we attract new customers.”

Best of both worlds

According to Bu, SYNthesis med chem’s ‘best of both worlds’ approach has enabled the company to expand its global chemistry capacity to more than 60 chemists. The new facility in the UK “will allow us to take the next step forward”, he added.

SYNthesis will also be announcing plans for its operations in China later this year, Bu noted.