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 GMP API Manufacture. Its track record over the last 10 years includes advancing numerous drug candidates, with 32 projects reaching preclinical stages, 21 moving 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-ServicesSM and ABS-OneStepSM, 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.”

About Accelero Biostructures

Accelero Biostructures (www.accelerobio.com) was founded in 2015 to capitalise on over 20 years of previous structural genomics and structural biology expertise using high-throughput protein X-ray crystallography. With the development and deployment of new platforms and services, ABS ServicesSM and ABS-OneStepSM, ABS-ServicesSM provides a unified pipeline of gene-to-structure protein X-ray crystallography and structural biology solutions aimed at the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to support structure-based drug discovery and protein engineering, and ABS-OneStepSM is the next-generation platform for hit generation in early drug discovery to develop novel therapeutics using a fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) approach. Fragment library screening with ABS-OneStepSM resolves key bottlenecks in conventional FBDD approaches. ABS-OneStepSM provides an extremely sensitive, efficient, experimental, single-step approach for determining fragment hits and their 3D structures using high-throughput protein X-ray crystallography.

About Concept Life Sciences

Founded in 1989, Concept Life Sciences is an established drug discovery and development contract research organisation based in the UK, with clients in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space ranging from blue chip to virtual biotech. The breadth and depth of its expertise is unparalleled in Europe and ranges from drug discovery and early development through to API manufacturing at multi kilogram scale under good manufacturing practice (GMP), which is delivered as a single service or as part of wider discovery and development programmes. Boasting a team of >200 accomplished scientists and professionals who operate from state-of-the-art Chemistry, Biology and GMP manufacturing facilities, in the last 10 years the CLS team has helped customers accelerate 4 drugs to the market, 21 candidates to clinic, and 30 to pre-clinical stage, reducing typical timeline from Concept to Clinic by half versus industry average.