Drs. Andrew Creasey and Alex Bonner, two businessmen/scientists interested in combinatorial chemistry, founded Chemicus because they saw that the process of lead optimization was bottlenecking for lack of sufficient quantities of compounds for testing. "Other companies are making hundreds of thousands of compounds using robotics and end up with very small amounts of a lot of different compounds, which is good for initial screening," asserts Creasey, now COO of the start-up. Chemicus's Abacus system makes larger amounts of similar compounds necessary for evaluating "hits" further down the drug discovery line. This is where the new hurdle in drug discovery exists.
Licensed from Genosys Biotechnologies Inc. [See Deal], where Creasey held the post as VP, business development and director of...