Sygnature Chemical Services, a leading provider of drug discovery services to the pharmaceutical industry, has today become Sygnature Discovery.  Due to an unprecedented demand for Sygnature's services from clients in the USA and Europe over the past 12 months and the addition of bioscience to its in-house capabilities, Sygnature has been renamed Sygnature Discovery to better reflect the portfolio of integrated drug discovery services that it now offers.  Sygnature currently employs over 50 laboratory-based medicinal chemists and in vitro biologists in its modern, purpose-built facility in BioCity Nottingham.  Most of these have PhDs and between 10-22 years drug discovery experience with companies such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck and OSI Pharmaceuticals.

Commenting on the evolution of Sygnature Chemical Services into Sygnature Discovery, Dr Simon Hirst, Sygnature's CEO said, "I am delighted to be able to announce Sygnature Discovery.  When I founded Sygnature Chemical Services in 2004 with 5½ staff and myself working in the laboratory, my ambition was to create an organisation which offered integrated drug discovery services to the global pharmaceutical industry.  Seven years later, that objective has been achieved.  Over the past 2 years, Sygnature has doubled in size to almost 60 people, we have recruited 10 highly-experienced medicinal chemists and biologists from AstraZeneca R&D Charnwood, started construction of a third laboratory to house 25 more scientists from November 2011, and filed 20 patent applications with clients.  The recent addition of further big pharma scientists greatly increases our drug discovery experience in inflammatory respiratory diseases, CNS and CV diseases.  The potent combination of medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry and in vitro biology under one roof means that Sygnature Discovery is able to rapidly and efficiently go through the ‘design, make, test' cycle to accelerate our clients' drug discovery projects towards development.  A number of integrated discovery projects will start in the near future."

For further information visit www.sygnaturediscovery.com

About Sygnature Discovery

Sygnature Discovery is a leading United Kingdom-based provider of integrated drug discovery services.  Sygnature's team of industry-experienced scientists add considerable value to clients' discovery programmes by undertaking complete drug discovery projects and key elements of the drug discovery process, such as hit finding, hit-to-lead and lead optimisation.  Sygnature's scientists also provide considerable intellectual input into clients' projects; thereby generating novel intellectual property.  Key areas of expertise include medicinal and computational chemistry, bioscience and ADME/toxicity (through a strategic alliance with Cyprotex Discovery).