Covalent Drugs

Our covalent drug discovery and characterization pipeline

Targeting the covalent modification of proteins with compounds containing reactive functional groups has led to the development of many new potent and selective drugs. Though covalent drug discovery has historically been conducted via structure-guided design, direct covalent ligand screening of electrophilic compound libraries has gained popularity as a primary approach. Momentum has integrated mass spectrometry hardware and software into an automated workflow that enables the primary screening of electrophilic libraries at a rate of 5,000 compounds daily.

To this end, we offer a 5.7K in-house covalent fragment library that is available for client screening projects. Follow-up experiments can further characterize a covalent lead’s binding site and the downstream effects of covalent drug treatment. We also offer a range of proteomic and chemoproteomic services to further support the development and analysis of covalent drug candidates. Our team has extensive experience working with covalent candidates, including covalent compounds that bind DNA or RNA.