Easy identification of therapeutic compounds in plants

Unigen Pharmaceuticals has implemented the ACD/Structure Elucidator from ACD/Labs to manage multiple analytical techniques and data formats when identifying the structure of lead compounds. The software provides a single platform to process, analyze, and store all analytical data in one place.

The company analyses the therapeutic chemicals found in plants, so structure identification is a critical task in its research. It usually involves the use of many different analytical techniques ranging from NMR, mass spectrometry, IR, and chromatography. To further complicate the process, data formats from different vendors make it difficult to collect, store and analyse all of this data.    

ACD/Structure Elucidator, however includes processing and database tools for 1D and 2D NMR, MS, UV-IR, and chromatography that bring all of this information together.

Dr Qi Jia, chief scientific officer at Unigen, commented: ‘At present, Unigen has five on-going discovery screening projects with each project yielding hundreds of purified natural compounds after bioassay guided isolation. How to improve our accuracy and efficiency in structure identification is a huge technology challenge to our chemists.’

The ability to create a comprehensive database has opened up the opportunity for a company to build a library of experimental data that can serve as a valuable resource for compound identification in the future. In addition, ACD/Structure Elucidator includes ACD/Labs' 1H, 13C, and 2D NMR prediction packages which can also be used independently for other challenging NMR projects.

Dr Jia believes that the extensive use of ACD/Structure Elucidator will help Unigen to bring more novel natural products into its discovery and development pipeline.

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Analysis and opinion




Analysis and opinion