There is not one single scientific innovation that you can point to and say, „this
has revolutionized drug discovery. „ The billions of dollars that have been invested
in proteomics, genomics, metabalomics., siRNA, etc. has not created the proportionate
output to the dollar input. Mergers and acquisitions have done nothing to invigorate
the discovery process. In fact, financial data has indicated that this aggressive
strategy to grow the business of a large pharmaceutical company has resulted in $1
trillion reduction of valuation over the past decade. Is this the path towards innovation
as an industry? As natural product chemists, the question that we need to ask is,
„what about chemical diversity? Why has chemical diversity not been exploited?“
Sequoia Sciences identifies novel chemistry from its library of structurally diverse
small molecules isolated from plants. The proprietary design of this library allows
for the biological screening of these compounds at optimal HTS concentrations without
non-drug-like interferences. Sequoia built this analytical process such that rapid
isolation and structure elucidation of active compounds could be accomplished. Using
the extremely sensitive Bruker TCI 1.7mm MicroCryoProbe, structure elucidation of
active compounds is completed on samples of limited mass at a rate 4–10 times faster.
The scientific strategy that Sequoia employs in order to rapidly uncover the chemical
diversity contained in plant natural products will be outlined. This presentation
will outline Sequoia's unique process that is used to create a library of compounds.
The MicroCryoProbe has now extended the high-throughput process to include NMR data
acquisition. Sequoia's inclusion of the MicroCryoProbe compliments its current platform
technologies for high-throughput natural products research for drug discovery allowing
it to uncover the chemical diversity contained in natural products.