Ultrafast drug discovery

Going beyond current limitations for NMR drug discovery and education

Ultrafast NMR-based drug discovery

The group develops new NMR methods to identify and characterize hit compounds against a broad range of protein targets, serving as starting points for structure-based drug discovery. We take advantage of the signal-to-noise enhancement provided by photo-Chemically Induced Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (photo-CIDNP) to reduce the NMR measurement time to a few seconds instead of half an hour. The recent efforts yielded a method able to screen by NMR at an unprecedented rate of 1500 samples per day, combining sensitivity-enhanced NMR hit detection with a flowthrough NMR platform.

The ultrafast NMR project led to the creation of a startup company, external pageNexMR GmbH, which commercializes the fragment libraries necessary for screening. Our technology was nominated for the Spark award 2022, you can find the explanatory video above to get a better grasp on our project.

Spark Award 2022 - Ultrafast structure activity relationship by photo-CIDNP NMR spectroscopy

Light-enhanced NMR spectrometer for CHF 10’000

Seventy-five years after its discovery, many countries of the Global South still have no access to NMR spectroscopy due to the high acquisition costs and the lack of liquid Helium needed for superconducting magnets.
Our vision is to produce a low-field (ca. 1 T) NMR spectrometer for academia in the “white” countries of the NMR world map (see below), which will cost no more than CHF 10’000. A smartphone app will control the experiments, and the spectrometer will include high-power LEDs to increase the NMR sensitivity through photo-CIDNP. We will develop applications for education (e.g. spin dynamics) and research (protein-ligand interactions).

Feel free to contact us:
We are happy to receive any questions and inputs (Takuya Segawa, ) !

nmr group map — The NMR world map: origin of NMR publications per capita. White countries have no access to NMR, while Switzerland appears as a global leader in NMR science. (Dr. Maria Pechlaner, Infozentrum Chem. Biol. Pharm., ETH Zürich; database: Scopus)

Positions

Although no Ph.D. or Post Doc positions are currently open, we always consider applications from talented candidates. We encourage undergraduate students with chemistry, biophysics, or biochemistry background to contact us for a semester or master thesis on the topic of ultrafast NMR-based drug design.

We encourage undergraduate students with chemistry, biophysics, or biochemistry background to contact us () for a semester or master thesis on the topic of ultrafast NMR-based drug design.

Journal club

The Riek group together with the ).

We thank ETH Zürich for the financial support of this project.