The new year is fast approaching, which makes it the perfect time to reflect on all the important milestones that have happened for Domainex in 2022. As always, this year our team have worked closely to advance our clients’ projects across a wide variety of research phases and therapeutic areas.
Exciting projects
We’ve had plenty of collaborations to keep us occupied. In January, we were delighted to hear that Queen’s University Belfast entered a collaboration and licensing agreement with Ipsen to progress the FLIP inhibitor project that we supported. Not long after, we were proud to announce that we were collaborating with Parkinson’s UK to develop therapies targeting neuroinflammation to slow the progression of Parkinson’s. We also partnered with NRG Therapeutics on its Biomedical Catalyst Funded Parkinson’s Disease Project and were selected by Amphista Therapeutics as one of its trusted partners to provide integrated drug discovery services to advance its portfolio of projects targeting protein degradation.
Another exciting highlight of the year was that DMXD-011 was nominated as a preclinical drug candidate as a result of the work carried out by Domainex during an in-house research programme. Human ex-vivo data indicated that the drug should be effective in the treatment of interferonopathies such as lupus, Sjögren’s syndrome, and scleroderma.
Advancing our services
With plenty of exciting projects from new clients and repeat business from our current clients, we’ve increased our head count by 30 this year and invested in enhancing our facilities. Earlier this year we opened a new facility dedicated to our biology services to expand our research operations. The 7,000 sq ft facility resides at Unity Campus in Sawston (Cambridge’s newest science and technology park) and complements our existing 20,000 sq ft Chemistry & Bioanalytical Centre of Excellence at Chesterford Research Park. We also announced our purchase of over £1M worth of new equipment from Waters to enhance our capabilities in analytical chemistry, bioanalytical sciences and in vitro absorbance, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) assays.
To support our ongoing success, we’ve expanded and strengthened our executive and management teams. Back in August, Dr Eddy Littler was appointed as Domainex’s Executive Chairman and more recently we announced a number of strategic internal promotions. The newly bolstered teams will be key to driving the further development of Domainex during this ongoing period of growth.
Awards success
We’ve had success in a number of awards this year, such as achieving the Gold award for High Growth Business of the Year and Silver award for Business of the Year (more than 50 employees) at the Cambridge Independent SME Awards. Furthermore, we progressed to the National SME Business Awards Final in the High Growth Business of the Year category and won the Silver award.
We also won Most Innovative Drug Discovery CRO 2022 in the GHP Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Awards back in September.
Additionally, we were selected as finalists for a number of awards including the Business Weekly Awards (International Trade Champion category), the Scrip Awards (Business Development Team of the Year) and the One Nucleus Genesis BioNewsRound Award (for our press release about DMXD-011).
Sharing the latest developments
It’s been a busy year and we’ve been making the most of the return of in-person events. We have sponsored and exhibited at a number of events both in the UK and overseas including the 8th RSC-BMCS Fragment-based Drug Discovery meeting (Cambridge, UK), the 33rd Medicinal Chemistry in Eastern England conference (Hatfield, UK), Discovery on Target (Boston, USA) and the XXVII EFMC International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry (Nice, France). It’s been great to get out and about and network with new and existing connections in the research community.
We look forward to continuing to accelerate scientific progress by further growing and investing in the company and with such a strong team in place, we’re confident of Domainex’s continued success.