Who's doing FBLD in 2011?

It’s been almost two years since our last attempt at cataloging companies doing fragment-based lead discovery. That list contained 19 entries, and 5 others were mentioned in the comments section. A paper just published online by Phil Hajduk and colleagues at Abbott in J. Comput. Aided Mol. Des. provides another list of 19 companies, which has inspired Practical Fragments to combine the two to provide what we hope is the most comprehensive list of companies working in FBLD. (The paper itself is worth reading too for insights into how fragment screening has evolved. For example, Abbott pioneered the use of NMR for finding and characterizing fragments, but now functional screening, modeling, and X-ray crystallography are dominant.)

Companies doing FBLD:

Abbott Laboratories
Ansaris (previously Locus)
AstraZeneca
Astex
Beactica
BioFocus (Galapagos)
BioLeap
Biosensor Tools
BioSolveIT
Boehringer Ingelheim
Carmot Therapeutics
Crelux
Crown Biosciences
Crystax Pharmaceuticals (web site seems down - are they still around?)
Eli Lilly
Emerald BioStructures (from deCODE)
Evotec
Genentech (Roche)
Genzyme (Sanfi-Aventis)
GlaxoSmithKline
Graffinity Pharmaceuticals (NovAliX)
iNovacia
IOTA Pharmaceuticals
Johnson & Johnson
Kinetic Discovery
MEDIT
Merck
Nerviano Medical Sciences
NovAliX
Novartis
Pfizer
Pharma Diagnostics
Plexxikon
Polyphor
Proteros
Pyxis Discovery
Roche 
Schrodinger
Selcia
Sprint Bioscience
Structure Based Design
Vernalis
Zenobia Therapeutics
ZoBio

Unlike the previous list, this one also includes large pharmaceutical companies known to be active in FBLD. Companies that have been acquired or merged are listed separately if they maintain separate web sites. The list excludes companies solely focused on selling fragment libraries, as these are covered separately.

The current list includes some 44 companies, which illustrates how widespread FBLD has become. The continuity is also encouraging: despite the challenging economic environment of the last few years, aside from a few acquisitions, a name change, and a spin-off, all the companies from the 2009 list are still around (with the possible exception of Crystax).

I’m sure the list is still incomplete, so if you know of someone else please add them to the comment section.