Our Technology

Design Pharma’s stack of proprietary and unrivalled technologies build a unique small molecule drug discovery engine to rapidly discover and biosynthetically produce drug compound candidates for drug development at an unprecedented scale: Droplet-microfluidics for single cell culture and screening provides access to the universe of molecule biosynthesis encoded in live cells at a higher throughput than any other method; our cell-based multiplex GPCR assay plattform screens for bioactivity of compounds at scales enabled by Next-Generation-Sequencing (NGS); our engineering-inspired cell-free biosynthesis rapidly builds compounds to test chemical structures and the many variations thereof created by our platform; and machine learning helps us to biosynthetically create better compound candidates.

Our drug discovery collaborations may involve all technologies or only a subset depending on the needs of our partner’s project.

SMALL MOLECULES & MICROFLUIDICS PLATFORM
G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) SCREENING PLATFORM
AI-GUIDED BIOMINING
CELL FREE SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY PLATFORM
Our Approach
Drug discovery

While Design Pharma’s ultra high-throughput droplet technology enables us to explore the metabolite richness of the most diverse microbiota, we also mine other molecular sources for G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) screening, such as chemical compound libraries, peptide and antibody libraries, DNA-encoded libraries or even precious patient samples. Cell-free synthetic biology then allows us to quickly produce identified chemical scaffolds from hit candidates and to diversify those structures for further candidate molecule and lead optimization. 

Biological insights in pre-clinical R&D and clinical trials

GPCRs modulate practically every aspect of human physiology. Binding of ligands lead to activation of GPCRs and cell signalling being involved in such diverse (patho-) physiological processes as the regulation of the immune system’s activity and inflammation, growth and metastasis of tumors, the endocrine system and regulation through neurotransmitters and hormones. Design Pharma’s multiplex GPCR platform enables the effective use of limited precious animal model or patient samples for direct profiling of global GPCR activity. Simultaneous profiling of hundreds of GPCRs creates valuable insight for a drugs’ effect on physiological processes and to better understand potential drug side effects or differences among patients for variable responses to a therapeutic.

Our platform matches small molecule modulators with human protein targets in disease pathways at scale
Intellectual property

Strong protection of Design Pharmaceuticals’ technology platform by filed and licensed patents and patent applications is the basis for our value generation:

10+ patents filed on our microfluidic workflow and 3 patents for the treatment of certain diseases
Exclusive and non-exclusive licences from US and French universities and institutions on microfluidics technologies
Exclusive worldwide licence for our high-throughput GPCR/protein hit screening platform
Exclusive worldwide licence agreement for our cell free biosynthetic platform for biomining and synthesis of molecular compounds

Our continuous research and development efforts allow us to strengthen and renew this strong IP position, securing Design Pharmaceuticals' leading position for the discovery and development of small molecules.