Development Capabilities

Once a lead candidate is selected, there is tremendous pressure to achieve product commercialization in as short a timeframe as possible. To date, synthetic carbohydrates are underrepresented within pharmaceutical or biotech pipelines because of substandard discovery tools and material access solutions. Ancora’s integrated platform addresses this need by facilitating each critical step in carbohydrate-based therapeutic and vaccine development.

Ancora’s development technology and deep expertise enable several critical capabilities including: rapid lead candidate identification, candidate optimization, large scale production of targeted carbohydrates, and production under GMP conditions.

Lead Identification

Application of carbohydrates in medicinal chemical has historically been challenging due to the lengthy syntheses required to produce even a single structure. Current methods involve developing a new synthesis protocol for each new modification and lead to very time consuming and labor intensive discovery programs. Ancora’s synthesis technology enables the rapid production of clearly defined complex carbohydrate structures from a limited set of versatile building blocks. The use of high purity, well-defined carbohydrates in early biochemical and cell-based assays allows for rapid identification of initial lead structures, compared to biosynthetic-derived materials that provide a range of often ill-defined potential leads.

Lead Optimization

Traditional methods for lead optimization of carbohydrate-based molecules involve tedious and time consuming synthesis methods. Ancora’s technology enables the production of a wide range of carbohydrate derivatives that vary in sequence composition, length, branching and terminal modifications. All derivatives are chemically distinct and contribute to the rapid development of reliable structure-activity relationships.

Candidate and Product Scale-up

Ancora’s synthesis technology has been applied to the production of industrial quantities of complex carbohydrates. Through the development of scalable building block procedures and reproducible assembly methods, Ancora has established robust synthesis methods for the manufacturing of complex carbohydrate-based products.

GMP Manufacture

Ancora is developing synthetic and analytical methods that allow for facile transfer of a wide-range of methods to a GMP environment. Commercialization of synthetic carbohydrates will require high quality material to support the development pathway. Ancora is establishing the GMP infrastructure necessary to support clinical and commercial development of synthetic carbohydrate lead candidates and products.