Technology Platform

In its product development, 4SC AG relies on the support of
research processes from computer simulations and has developed the patented 4SCan® technology required for the
purpose. Simulations of this kind, which have resulted in significant increases in productivity in almost all industries, still
play a relatively minor role in pharmaceutical research.
However, the process is as simple as it is efficient:
the principle of high throughput screening, as is applied in early phases of drug discovery to detect drug candidates in the laboratory, is for the most part transferred from the laboratory
bench (in vitro) to the computer (in silico).
The computer simulates the binding potentially active substances to a target molecule (the target) of relevance to a disease. A database of 6.2 million substances is screened to identify possible hits. In visual terms, this corresponds to searching for the right key to a lock. This process of virtual screening on the computer produces a preliminary selection and ranking list of a few hundred molecules, which bind to the target. Unlike the traditional in vitro screening processes, this requires only a very short time and minimal experimental effort.

4SC AG’s integrated technology platform consists of more
than just in silico screening, however. The drug candidates
preselected with the help of 4SCan® are then chemically synthesised and subjected to a wide range of biological tests
(in vitro assays). Even at this early phase, the company is in
a position to make predictions in terms of the suitability of
these drug candidates for the subsequent preclinical phase.
A series of computer programmes developed in-house are
also used by means of which it is possible, for example, to
predict the absorption or toxicity of active agents within the
human body (ADMET analysis) and to filter out molecules with
an undesirable profile. In an iterative process, all of the steps
– computer-based screening, medicinal chemistry, biological
tests and ADMET analysis – are run through a number of
times, until a series of optimised drug candidates is in place
for the purposes of preclinical and clinical development.

The figures speak for themselves: with the use of the 4SC
AG integrated technology platform, the average hit rate for
active agents in the early phase of biological activity tests is
increased by a factor of 20-50. And the average time required
for the process from the positively-tested drug candidate
through to the lead structure for the drug is reduced by
half. In this way, the development time needed from target
through to the start of clinical development can be cut by
two to two and a half years on average. This in turn means
that within the context of the term of its patent, a drug can
be marketed exclusively for longer – a fairly decisive argument
in terms of pharmaceutical research.