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Cetek Corporation is a drug discovery company prospecting natural extracts for novel, patentable compounds as drug lead candidates using its proprietary high-throughput screening program.

The company started on a fee-for-service basis, James Little, President, explained to Partnering Focus. “We began using this approach to validate the platform”, Dr Little explained. “This resulted in deals with more than 25 clients, including protein targets, and synthetic and natural libraries, and provided us with a solid foundation. The deals covered 150 targets and over 6 million compounds. The power of the platform, which provided us with better results than even we expected, also allowed us to move from this fee-for-service model to a drug discovery company model.”

Cetek’s proprietary assay, CE Assay™, is based on capillary electrophoresis developed at the Barnett Institute of Northeastern University. The company’s Natural Product Factory™ technology is a highly efficient process for screening, isolating, and dereplicating compounds from extracts, which rapidly identifies novel, drug-like compounds.

Cetek has around twenty ongoing discovery programs, with a main focus on cancer and anti-infectives. Other programs include Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, anti-parasitics, diuresis and immunosuppression. All Cetek’s targets are well-validated.

“We are starting to find preclinical compounds from these programs, and are seeking partners from large pharma, in return for upfront and milestone payments and royalties. We are not looking to move into clinical trials yet, but this may be an aim for the future”, Dr Little explained.

Cetek runs its operations in an industrialized process akin to a factory environment (24 hours a day, five days a week), which confirms that the science and technology is robust and can easily translate to an industrialized approach.

“What makes Cetek different? Our platform works well with natural products, compared with other technologies which struggle with these types of libraries. We can also look ‘deeper’ into extracts than other assays, differentiating between the hundreds or thousands of compounds that may be there,” Dr Little explained. “In five years’ time, we would like to be the natural product company to the world! We would like to be high on potential partner company’s agendas, with a reputation for isolating compounds that no-one else can find.”

Cetek’s collaborators

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