Forma Therapeutics Inc.
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Technology platforms aren't in vogue these days. Many companies who took that route have since scaled back investments in their platform technology to concentrate instead on pipeline candidates. Forma Therapeutics thinks it can buck that trend. The company, founded in March 2008, is betting on a platform that features a chemical synthesis approach, called Diversity Oriented Synthesis (DOS), which can rapidly produce a large variety of chemical structures that have structural complexity similar to chemicals isolated from natural products, such as plants or corals reefs. Most automated synthesis platforms produce simpler chemical structures, but the large intricate, structures found natural products have long been a mainstay of pharmaceutical drug discovery efforts and gives the company access to unique structural space.