MediChem Life Sciences to Manage Beamline at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source
CHICAGO and ARGONNE, Ill., Oct. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- MediChem Life Sciences (Nasdaq: MCLS - news) and Argonne National Laboratory announced today that MediChem's newly-formed subsidiary, Advanced X-Ray Analytical Services, Inc. (AXAS), has been awarded the contract to operate the Commercial Collaborative Access Team (COM-CAT) beamline at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source (APS).
MediChem has taken the lead to establish a commercial X-ray analytical service capability that will use the high-brilliance X-ray beam from the APS, a national synchrotron radiation user facility. For the first time, companies are provided with just-in-time, fee-for-service access to obtain state-of-the- art X-ray analysis using techniques such as protein crystallography, powder diffraction, and X-ray spectroscopy.
``Our new AXAS subsidiary offers an opportunity for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to easily and affordably take advantage of this state- of-the-art facility,'' said Michael T. Flavin, Ph.D., MediChem's president and CEO. ``The result will be faster development of new and better life saving therapeutics.''
``The COM-CAT at the APS will support a broad spectrum of small- and medium-sized businesses that do not have the resources or expertise to benefit from this national resource in order to improve their products,'' said Gopal Shenoy, senior scientific director at the Advanced Photon Source. He added that many organizations have worked hard over the years in making it possible for the APS to establish COM-CAT, and finally award the contract to AXAS, a subsidiary of MediChem.
``I am particularly grateful to the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago for fostering the idea back in 1996, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs for providing funds to the APS for building the COM-CAT X-ray beamline, and Argonne National Laboratory management and the Department of Energy for their continued support,'' Shenoy said.
The Advanced Photon Source and COM-CAT
The APS, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, is one of only three 3rd generation hard X-ray sources in the world -- and the only one in the Western Hemisphere. It offers unsurpassed power to analyze the structures of proteins that are potential drug targets, as well as the structures of the drugs themselves. The X-ray source at the APS is also tunable, an important advantage to scientists that allows precise selection of the energy of X-rays.
The COM-CAT beamline was constructed with $8.7 million provided by the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs of the State of Illinois. The Governor and the State Legislature of Illinois have recognized the value of making the technologies at Argonne National Laboratory available to the industrial community, and AXAS was organized to carry out this objective through a business service model for which MediChem is well known. AXAS will actively offer its services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as to others involved in semi-conductors, catalyst development and environmental analysis.
COM-CAT was designed as a multi-purpose beamline to service a wide range of industrial applications. In addition to equipment for protein crystallography, COM-CAT has a unique detector array for the analysis of polymorphs in drugs and other materials through powder diffraction at a resolution that far surpasses anything that can be achieved with a laboratory X-ray source. Automated sample handling is also being introduced by AXAS to allow for high-throughput analysis of protein crystals. During commissioning of the beamline, the structures of more than 50 proteins were determined by industrial and academic users of COM-CAT.
Pharmaceutical Drug Development Applications
High-intensity X-rays from synchrotrons have been a powerful research tool for over three decades. Recent advances, particularly in the area of structural proteomics, have made analysis at the APS and other synchrotrons a crucial component of pharmaceutical and materials development.
At COM-CAT, scientists can analyze the behavior of X-rays as they pass through a protein crystal to determine the locations of the atoms within the protein. From the resulting data, a detailed picture of the three-dimensional structure of the protein is derived. This method is essential for modern structure-based drug design. Analysis of the interactions of potential drug molecules with a protein suggests chemical modifications that enhance pharmaceutical properties such as effectiveness and stability.
``Synchrotron radiation has revolutionized the analysis of materials by X- rays,'' said Stephen R. Wasserman, Ph.D., vice president of AXAS and one of the two designers and builders of the COM-CAT facility. ``Through AXAS, all companies have access to capabilities that, until now, have been limited to a select number of corporations.'' |
