A New Alliance Aims to Accelerate the Discovery of Future Medicines

CHICAGO, IL – December 02, 2025 – The journey to develop a new medicine is one of science’s most arduous, expensive, and time-consuming endeavors. For every successful therapy that reaches a patient’s bedside, thousands of potential candidates have failed along a path that can stretch over a decade and cost billions. But a new strategic collaboration announced today between two highly specialized companies, Peapod Bio Inc. and Enamine Ltd., aims to build a powerful new engine to accelerate the very first, and arguably most critical, step of this journey: finding a promising new drug candidate.

This partnership represents more than a simple business agreement; it signifies a fusion of cutting-edge technology and massive chemical scale designed to tackle a fundamental bottleneck in modern medicine. By integrating their unique strengths, the companies hope to provide researchers with a more streamlined, efficient, and powerful way to identify the “hits” that could become the breakthrough treatments of tomorrow, offering a new sense of momentum in the quest for cures.

The Challenge of Finding a Needle in a Chemical Haystack

At the heart of early-stage drug discovery lies a monumental search. Scientists must sift through immense collections of chemical compounds to find a single molecule that can interact with a specific biological target—such as a protein or RNA molecule involved in a disease—in a desired way. This process, known as high-throughput screening (HTS), is a numbers game on an epic scale. The larger and more diverse the library of compounds, the higher the chance of finding a unique starting point for a new drug.

However, screening millions of molecules is fraught with challenges. Traditional methods can be slow and often require compounds or biological targets to be tagged with fluorescent or radioactive labels. This labeling process is not only time-consuming and expensive but can also interfere with the very interaction scientists are trying to measure, leading to false positives or missed opportunities. Subsequently, confirming these initial hits requires another round of complex validation assays, further extending timelines. The entire process is a high-stakes filter, designed to find a few drops of gold in a river of sand, and any innovation that can make this filter faster and more accurate has profound implications for the entire drug development pipeline.

Fusing Speed and Scale: A Technological Powerhouse

The collaboration between Chicago-based Peapod Bio and Kyiv-based Enamine creates a seamless workflow that directly addresses these long-standing challenges by uniting two complementary pillars of modern drug discovery: precision screening and unparalleled chemical diversity.

Peapod Bio brings its proprietary Affinity Selection Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) platform to the table. This advanced technology is a game-changer because it is a “label-free” method. It directly measures the binding of a compound to its target by identifying the exact mass of the interacting molecules. This eliminates the need for cumbersome labels, providing cleaner, more reliable data. The company’s platform is further enhanced by its use of Polymeric Enrichment Arrays (PEAs), which rapidly purify samples and reduce the background noise that can plague other mass spectrometry techniques. The result is a system that can rapidly and accurately screen vast numbers of compounds against virtually any soluble target, including notoriously difficult ones like protein complexes and RNA, with high sensitivity.

On the other side of the partnership, Enamine provides the “haystack”—the largest one in the world. The Ukrainian company is renowned for maintaining a physical collection of over 4.6 million screening compounds. But its most staggering asset is the Enamine REAL Space, a virtual database of over 78 billion compounds that are synthetically feasible and can be custom-made on demand in just a few weeks. This colossal chemical universe gives researchers an unprecedented opportunity to explore novel chemical structures beyond what is available in any physical library. By combining Peapod’s high-speed ASMS engine with Enamine's immense and accessible library, the partnership creates an integrated discovery platform of formidable power.

“This collaboration brings together complementary strengths, exceptional chemistry and cutting-edge screening solutions,” said Dr. Zachary Gurard-Levin, CEO of Peapod Bio, in the official announcement. Iryna Iavniuk, CEO of Enamine in the US, added, “Our combined expertise will help researchers accelerate the identification of high value starting points for drug development.”

Reshaping the Drug Discovery Landscape

This strategic alliance is also a significant move in the highly competitive contract research organization (CRO) market. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries are increasingly outsourcing their research and development activities to cut costs, gain access to specialized technology, and focus on their core competencies. The global market for pharmaceutical R&D outsourcing is already valued at tens of billions of dollars and is projected to grow significantly in the coming years.

In this environment, CROs that can offer integrated, end-to-end solutions are at a distinct advantage. Rather than contracting with one company for compound libraries and another for screening services, a client can now turn to the Peapod-Enamine partnership for a one-stop shop. This not only simplifies logistics but also ensures a cohesive workflow where Enamine’s follow-up chemistry expertise can be immediately applied to validate and optimize the hits identified by Peapod’s screening platform. This synergy creates a powerful value proposition that positions the duo to compete effectively with larger, established players like Charles River Laboratories and Eurofins, who also offer integrated discovery services but may lack this specific combination of proprietary ASMS technology and a multi-billion compound virtual library.

From Lab Bench to Bedside: The Human Impact

While the technical specifications and business strategy are impressive, the most profound impact of this collaboration lies in its potential to accelerate hope for patients. Every day saved in the lab is a day closer to a new therapy reaching the clinic. By making the initial phase of hit discovery dramatically more efficient, this partnership could shorten the preclinical development timeline, which currently consumes years of effort before a drug candidate is even tested in humans.

Consider the implications for diseases with high unmet needs. For rare genetic disorders, where patient populations are small and commercial incentives can be limited, a more cost-effective discovery process can make developing a new treatment more viable. For complex diseases like Alzheimer's or notoriously difficult-to-treat cancers, the ability to screen against new targets using Enamine’s vast and novel chemical space could uncover entirely new therapeutic approaches that were previously missed. This acceleration at the foundational level of science is what ultimately fuels the pipeline of medical breakthroughs.

The alliance between Peapod Bio and Enamine is a powerful reminder that progress often happens at the intersection of disciplines. By combining expertise in mass spectrometry, chemistry, and data science, this partnership is not just creating a more efficient service for scientists; it is building a more robust and faster bridge between a scientific question and a potential human solution. While the path from a lab discovery to a pharmacy shelf remains long, innovations like this are critical to shortening the distance and bringing future therapies to the people who need them most.