Interview with Dr Alessandro Carugo, Head of Oncology at IRBM, on how we are reshaping rare cancer drug discovery in this month’s Drug Discovery World

Our peptide chemistry team is excited to announce a new publication in the journal “Circulation”, which highlights the outcome of a highly successful drug discovery collaboration with Merck & co.’s world-class drug discovery group (Kenilworth, New Jersey).

The publication describes the discovery of a novel series of Imidazopyrazine derivatives by IRBM’s drug discovery team. This novel series of SHP2 allosteric inhibitors, having an imidazopyrazine 6,5-fused heterocyclic system as central scaffold, showed an excellent potency in enzyme and cellular assays.

Innovative synthetic strategies giving access to a larger chemical space are of great importance to make the development of peptide therapeutics a faster and more efficient process. Katritzky salts, easily prepared from primary amines, offer peptide chemists a tool to achieve many chemical transformations in a straightforward manner.