Nottingham, UK — Sygnature Chemical Services, a leading UK-based provider of premium discovery chemistry services to the global pharmaceutical industry, today announced the appointment of Dr Michael (Mick) Knaggs as head of computational chemistry.
Dr Simon Hirst, Sygnature’s, chief executive officer, commented, “I welcome Mick to Sygnature Chemical Services; he is a great addition to our scientific team and has joined Sygnature at an opportune time. Mick has over ten years’ computational chemistry experience in the pharmaceutical industry and academia in the UK and USA. He has good experience of undertaking virtual screening projects (structure-based and ligand-based approaches) in a variety of targets (CNS, tropical diseases, anti-virals anti-bacterials etc), pharmacophore modelling, QSAR and library design; as well as protein modelling and simulation work.
Sygnature has experienced a growing interest in its computational chemistry services over the past few months, both as a stand-alone service and to support medicinal chemistry-based projects. Mick is already contributing his expertise into several on-going projects and has been involved in a number of proposals for new projects which will involve computational chemistry in some form.”
Dr Michael Knaggs added, “I am pleased to join the company at a time when Sygnature has been experiencing an increase in interest in its discovery chemistry services, and has just formed a strategic alliance with Cyprotex to provide a fully-integrated discovery chemistry/DMPK services. Computational chemistry forms a key component of the drug discovery process — from hit identification through virtual screening to guiding structural modifications to enhance potency and selectivity during medicinal chemistry-driven optimisation. I am looking forward to working with Simon and the rest of the Sygnature team.”