From Catalogue to Collaboration: Enamine’s 35 Years of Advancing Drug Discovery

© Enamine

“When we started this journey back in 1991, the world of drug discovery was on the cusp of a revolution. At that time, high-throughput screening was emerging as a powerful new approach, and we saw a clear opportunity to meet the rapidly growing demand for novel compound libraries, because novel and diverse chemistry was the key to success. We started with a simple conviction: access to new molecules should be fast, affordable, and diverse, but never a bottleneck in the pursuit of eventually bringing new medicines to market.

Thirty-five years later, I look at what we have all built, and I am genuinely humbled. From those early days, when Enamine was a small grant-funded group in the Kyiv Institute of Organic Chemistry, it has grown into a global leader and trusted partner to pharmaceutical and biotech companies, drug discovery centers, and academic institutions across the world. Now we are a team of more than 3 thousand people with sites in 6 countries. Our screening collections, building blocks, chemical libraries, and early drug discovery services are now part of countless research programs worldwide. Today, Enamine stands among the top 20 Contract Research Organizations (CRO`s) in the field worldwide… I could not even dream of anything like that back in those days.

We were expanding very fast each year, multiplying our capabilities. These years are years of hard teamwork and passion, that have led to constant growth. But what excites me most today is not what we have already delivered, but where we are headed. We live in a thrilling new era, when new approaches and methods are reshaped every day. Rather than standing on the sidelines, we at Enamine have chosen to lead. Through our drug discovery services, we have built a fully integrated platform that connects world-class chemistry, biology, and computational science with access to ultra-large chemical spaces. Together with our years of gained knowledge and expertise, this forms one seamless, powerful organism. 

We are no longer another catalog company that supplies compounds. We have become partners in the entire early drug discovery journey, which starts from target identification up to preclinical studies.

The challenges ahead are immense. But so is our resolve. At 35, Enamine is not a company looking back at its legacy. We are a company accelerating into its most ambitious chapter yet, with the same passion for everyday work, the same commitment, and the same belief that innovation in modern science should be accessible to the entire scientific community globally.”

- Andrey A. Tolmachev, Founder and Owner of Enamine