DiscoverRx develops, commercializes and manufactures reagents and assay kits for the drug discovery

Drug discovery

In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered or designed.In the past most drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery...

 market. Their focus is on lucrative protein target classes, such as G-protein-coupled receptors and kinase

Kinase

In chemistry and biochemistry, a kinase is a type of enzyme that transfers phosphate groups from high-energy donor molecules, such as ATP, to specific substrates, a process referred to as phosphorylation. Kinases are part of the larger family of phosphotransferases...

s.

The company is built around a proprietary technology called enzyme fragment complementation or EFC which forms the basis of the assays that they design and market. In EFC, two β-galactosidase

Lactase

Lactase , a part of the β-galactosidase family of enzymes, is a glycoside hydrolase involved in the hydrolysis of the disaccharide lactose into constituent galactose and glucose monomers...

fragments are employed which are themselves inactive. One fragment (EA) has an inactivating deletion while the second fragment (ED) has a complementing fragment; in solution where both EA and ED are present, certain pairs of fragments combine spontaneously to form active complexes. Some pairs of fragments interact only weakly and combine to produce enzyme activity only when forced into close proximity by virtue of their attachment to proteins which bind to each other. This property permits evaluation of intracellular protein interactions for use in high throughput screening of drug candidates for their effect on specific cellular pathways. The company offers a wide variety of cell lines that produce such fusion products.