partners

Who are we?
Vichem Chemie Research Ltd. was founded in 1999 by Axxima Pharmaceuticals as its Hungarian medicinal chemistry subsidiary for drug discovery in the kinase field. Vichem became an independent private company via management buyout in 2005. Vichem (The Kinase Inhibitor Company”) is a research company engaged in rational drug design of kinase inhibitors for signal transduction therapy. Business strategy of Vichem is providing medicinal chemistry services and contract research, drug discovery and preclinical lead development for partners and development of own compounds. Products are early and late stage preclinical documentations of various kinase inhibitor compounds. In the past 24 years Vichem has developed a technology platform tailor-made for kinases (target identification, target validation, rational design of kinase inhibitors, HTS assays, medicinal chemistry). One of the tools of Vichem is the NCL™ (Nested Chemical Library) Kinase Inhibitor Library of (~27,000(+) compounds, around more than 130 core structures and several hundreds scaffolds. Vichem has found novel inhibitors against more than 120 pharmaceutically relevant kinases the slogan is “You select the target – we deliver the patentable inhibitor”.
Vichem applies kinase family-biased MasterKey concept with pharmacophore based scaffold hopping for discovering novel patentable leads and lead optimization for optimal ADMET and biological properties. Vichem provides “target fishing” solutions for the KinaTor™ technology for selectivity profiling and offtarget identification. Vichem prepares various reactive functions and linkers equipped kinase inhibitors and other drugs for covalent binding e.g. for immobilization (on resins) and for fluorescent tagging for tracking and binding experiments.
Vichem has discovered nanomolar inhibitors against >20 kinases playing leading role in infectious diseases (TB, HIV, influenza, HCMV, MERS, SARS etc.). The developed IP rights have been protected in more than 40 basic patent applications in >130 patent applications in national phases. Achievements, partners, strategic alliances, top publications and patent application links in part are available on the company homepage.
In the NeoVasculostop project Vichem utilizes its more than 24 years of medicinal chemistry experience in the development of kinase inhibitors, from early discovery of small molecule VEGFR inhibitors (Cancer Res. 1996 Aug 1;56(15):3540-5) merged with the modern trend of covalent binding inhibitors.
Vichem aims to develop in vivo biologically active, selective and non-toxic lead molecules against retinopathy together with the expert consortial partners of the project. The preliminary results are promising, and have opened the way for lead optimization. In the next steps the IPR will be protected by patenting and a preclinical dossier will be prepared with the partners for potential investors to be taken into drug development.

Our Team
Five medicinal chemist and four pharmacist employees (five of them have PhD) are included in the project, all together having more than hundred-fifty years of experience in kinase inhibitor research. Three dedicated medicinal chemists are responsible for synthesis of compounds, one NMR spectroscopist and an HPLC-MS expert are doing structure validations and QC. Molecular modeling is performed by an expert with 8 years experience in the field. Enzymatic assays have been developed and performed by a pharmacist (MD) and a chemist (MSc). Cellular experiments have been developed and performed by a molecular biologist (PhD) pharmacist.