Overview

Vast Bioscience offers the pharmaceutical industry a unique opportunity to develop innovative drugs with superior potency, target selectivity and safety. These efforts are supported by a management team with a strong pedigree in biotechnology as well as drug discovery and development. Using out technology platform called VAST (Versatile Assembly on Stable Templates), enables the rapid and simple synthesis of an almost limitless array of drug-like molecules with diverse, complex and tailored 3D-shapes.This large array of 3D shapes are unique and explore an enormous universe of unchartered 3D space when compared to pharma collections. This provides the ability to develop molecules for lots of different targets, and indeed the VAST library has provided hits over a number of different target classes. In addition, history has taught us that as molecules progress from discovery to drugs they have increased 3D character, reflecting improved safety being driven by improved selectivity. This 2D to 3D progression is driven by hit rates in early discovery, with higher hit rates and promiscuity for 2D molecules when compared to 3D molecules and the dearth of systematically diverse 3D shapes in pharma collections of molecules for screening. Vast Bioscience addresses the issue by providing large arrays of systematically diverse 3D shapes for screening. The VAST platform helps overcome some of the issues of HTS , such as the two-dimensional (2D) character of most of the molecules in the collections. These rod or disc-like shapes bind to many other sites as well as the intended target-site, resulting in numerous side effects. Addressing this problem has been difficult because of the complexities of more 3-dimensional (3D) chemistry, particularly the number of synthetic steps required and the starting templates available. Vast is also focussed on developing products in pain management. The focus currently is on unlocking the potential of Nav1.7 sodium channel as a pain target.