Instrumentation

Through our IRORI line of products and services, we develop, manufacture and sell proprietary instruments and consumables for compound library synthesis to pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations. Our products are based on a patented core technology referred to as Directed Sorting.

Directed Sorting
Our Directed Sorting technology produces discrete compounds in multi-milligram quantities, synthesized with very high productivity. Our technology has been widely adopted throughout the industry. In 1999, over one million compounds were synthesized by our customers using this technique. Directed Sorting combines the key advantages, while avoiding the drawbacks, of the two traditional synthesis techniques—parallel synthesis and split-and-pool synthesis.

Parallel synthesis yields discrete compounds and large amounts of each compound. Virtually all chemists find this favorable. However, a large number of reactions must be performed to generate large libraries. Automating parallel synthesis helps to eliminate the tedium of the process, but does little to address the limited number of compounds that can be synthesized per unit time and per reaction. The split-and-pool technique is significantly more productive than parallel synthesis but produces compounds in mixtures whose components must be identified using various tagging and screening techniques. Therefore, this technique has found limited commercial applicability.

Discovery Partners International, 9640 Towne Centre Drive, San Diego, CA 92121. Tel: 858-455-8600; Fax: 858-546-3081 .