NovAliX Signs Partnership Agreement to Design and Screen Sanofi’s New DNA-Encoded Libraries

NovAliX, a Contract Research Organization (CRO) specializing in drug research and development, today announces its partnership with Sanofi for the development of new DNA-Encoded Libraries (DELs). This multi-year agreement will see the partners join forces to design both general and focused chemical libraries, and carry out screening activities to identify new and useful chemical structures.

DEL technology can be used to support the drug discovery process by verifying therapeutic targets and identifying new biologically active molecules. DELs provide access to a wide range of chemotypes at a far lower cost per point than High-Throughput Screening (HTS). Automating the processing of samples and analytical data, together with the majority of collection tasks, improves the scientific productivity and reliability of screening and production processes.

“This partnership with NovAliX will allow Sanofi to accelerate its transition in revolutionary screening technology by creating our own Sanofi-owned DNA-encoded library, significantly boosting our development of innovative healthcare solutions,” said John Macor, global head of integrated drug discovery at Sanofi.

“Throughout our long history in chemobiological screening techniques, we have always championed the potential of DEL technology. We see this agreement with Sanofi as a vindication of our belief; demonstrating the quality of our platform and the interest that the pharmaceutical sector has in this technology, which can be used to create new chemical diversities and to screen at a very high throughput,” said Denis Zeyer, CEO of NovAliX.

In December 2020, NovAliX invested €5.3 million ($6.4M) to expand its DEL platform, with support from Bpifrance and the Grand Est regional authorities. The technological developments that NovAliX has made over recent months with its DEL technology will be put to use in this latest partnership with Sanofi. In particular, this includes the use of new cheminformatics tools, which will allow for improved sampling of chemical space.

The partnership agreement between NovAliX and Sanofi will include exchanges of knowledge among experts from the two partners, specializing in DNA chemistry, medical chemistry, data processing and biology. The partnership is expected to result in the creation of around fifty chemical libraries, containing a total of approximately 1.5 billion compounds.