“Chemistry is our passion and drug discovery is our expertise” says Dr. Uday Khire, PhD, MBA, founder of the two-year-old company Cheminpharma LLC, a contract research organization (CRO) located at 25 Science Park at Yale in New Haven.

After many years at Bayer, Uday decided to launch his own entrepreneurial business, seeing an opportunity in the New Haven area for a chemistry-based drug discovery CRO. “Connecticut, especially the New Haven area, is home to various biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and the science sector continues to grow there due to the research being done at Yale University,” he says.

Pharmaceutical companies are facing many challenges, Uday says, including weak pipelines, expiration of key product patents, and the increasing cost of drug discovery compounded by dismal global financial conditions. To stand up to these challenges, Uday believes, pharmaceutical companies are changing their business model to include more partnerships, more collaborations, and more outsourcing.

Cheminpharma’s objective is to be a reliable, flexible, and knowledgeable chemistry partner. The company’s medicinal chemistry services include hit to lead generation, lead optimization, building SAR (structure-activity relationship), and structure-based drug design. Besides medicinal chemistry services, Cheminpharma provides synthesis of intermediates, reference compounds, etc. 

In addition to their focus on chemistry-based services, Cheminpharma looks to in-license and develop key products that can be used in the drug discovery process. For example, from Stanford University they have recently licensed in a cell-permeable small molecule called Shield-1. Shield-1 is a novel technique used to quickly and reversibly control cellular levels of proteins of interest. Its application has been shown in mouse models.

Uday spent almost ten years at the Bayer Research Center in West Haven site working on preclinical drug discovery projects in various therapeutic areas, but the major focus was oncology. He is a co-inventor of “Nexavar,” a novel kinase inhibitor that has been approved to treat kidney and liver cancer in the US and other major markets. “This was a huge experience and gave me an opportunity to be involved in drug discovery from target identification all the way to market,” Uday says.

The Cheminpharma team consists of ex-Bayer chemists, including Jefferson Chin, who joined Uday as a partner, Dr. Davoud Asgari, and Furahi Achebe. In addition, Dr. Suresh Katti, with extensive experience in structure-based drug design including molecular modeling and structural biology, acts as a consultant.

Website: http://www.cheminpharma.com/