Concept Life Sciences and Accelero Biostructures partner to advance X-ray crystallography in early drug discovery

UK-based Concept Life Sciences (Concept) and Accelero Biostructures (Accelero) in the US have formed an industry-leading partnership which will help pharma businesses worldwide speed up drug development by up to tenfold.

The collaboration accelerates the timeline for progressing from drug discovery to clinical trials through the integration of Accelero’s specialised X-ray crystallography and structural biology platforms.

Concept offers comprehensive drug discovery expertise, including biophysics, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and GMPAPI Manufacture. Its track record over the last 10 years includes advancing numerous drug candidates, with 32 projects reaching preclinical stages, 21moving to clinical trials, and 4 ultimately brought to market.

Accelero, based in San Francisco, specialises in high-throughput protein X-ray crystallography—an essential cornerstone in understanding protein-ligand interactions in structure-based drug discovery and structural biology. Its proprietary platforms, ABS-Services^SMand ABS-OneStep^SM,enable precise hit identification and validation of target engagement for a wide variety of targets, including “undruggables”. These methods feed directly into Accelero’s AI-driven drug discovery initiatives, accelerating the path from initial screening to drug candidate selection.

The partnership combines Concept’s integrated drug discovery process with Accelero’s crystallography-based fragment screening for hit generation and iterative crystallography-driven inhibitor optimization. Together, they will provide clients with efficient hit-to-lead development, improving key factors such as target affinity, selectivity, and ADME properties. This is expected to significantly reduce development timelines and deliver faster transitions from discovery to clinical stages, which in many cases could be faster by ten times.

Debanu Das, Co-Founder and CEO of Accelero Biostructures, commented: “This collaboration brings together two teams dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in drug discovery. By uniting our expertise, we’re equipped to tackle complex challenges in a way that enhances the quality and pace of discovery. We’re excited to have already initiated several collaborative projects and look forward to seeing their impact.”

Ben Cliff, CEO of Concept Life Sciences, added: “Partnering with Accelero allows us to leverage our combined capabilities in a way that strengthens support for biopharma companies aiming to advance new therapies. This alliance underscores our commitment to driving scientific rigour and efficiency, ultimately helping more candidates progress smoothly through the discovery pipeline.”

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Notes to editors

For more information, please contact kathleen.wallace@bigpartnership.co.uk or on07710 700 337

About Accelero Biostructures

AcceleroBiostructures (www.accelerobio.com) was founded in 2015 to capitalis     e on over 20 years of previous structural genomics and structuralbiology expertise using high-throughput protein X-ray crystallography. With thedevelopment and deployment of new platforms and services, ABS Services^SMand ABS-OneStep^SM, ABS-Services^SM provides a unifiedpipeline of gene-to-structure protein X-ray crystallography and structuralbiology solutions aimed at the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries tosupport structure-based drug discovery and protein engineering, and ABS-OneStep^SMis the next-generation platform for hit generation in early drug discovery todevelop novel therapeutics using a fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD)approach. Fragment library screening with ABS-OneStep^SM resolves keybottlenecks in conventional FBDD approaches. ABS-OneStep^SM providesan extremely sensitive, efficient, experimental, single-step approach fordetermining fragment hits and their 3D structures using high-throughput proteinX-ray crystallography.

About Concept Life Sciences

Foundedin 1989, Concept Life Sciences is an established drug discovery and developmentcontract research organisation based in the UK, with clients in thepharmaceutical and biotechnology space ranging from blue chip to virtualbiotech. The breadth and depth of its expertise is unparalleled in Europe andranges from drug discovery and early development through to API manufacturingat multi kilogram scale under good manufacturing practice (GMP), which isdelivered as a single service or as part of wider discovery and developmentprogrammes. Boasting a team of >200 accomplished scientists andprofessionals who operate from state-of-the-art Chemistry, Biology and GMPmanufacturing facilities, in the last 10 years the CLS team has helpedcustomers accelerate 4 drugs to the market, 21 candidates to clinic, and 30 topre-clinical stage, reducing typical timeline from Concept to Clinic by halfversus industry average.

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