BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Alchemia: Affordable carbohydrates

January 25, 1999 8:00 AM UTC

Carbohydrate compounds play essential roles in many cell functions and have been implicated in events central to disease, such as hormone-cell recognition, cell-cell adhesion and virus-host or bacteria-host cell recognition. However, difficulties with manufacturing pure synthesized oligosaccharides have lessened their popularity as potential therapeutic compounds compared with proteins.

Alchemia Pty. Ltd. believes it has a chemical synthesis platform technology that overcomes many of the production challenges presented by carbohydrates. It is applying that platform to combinatorial chemistry to enable the formation of oligosaccharide compound libraries for lead discovery...