MedChemExpress

Overview

MedChemExpress (MCE for short) is a company focusing on bioactive small molecules and biochemical reagents. It is headquartered in New Jersey, USA. Its products include inhibitors, agonists, APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) and compound libraries, which are widely used in life science research fields such as cancer, neuroscience, and immunology. MedChemExpress claims to be a global scientific research reagent supply company.

Development History

MedChemExpress was initially established to provide bioactive molecules, and then gradually expanded to diversified product lines such as recombinant proteins, dyes, and kits. As of 2024, its products have covered target proteins in 20 signaling pathways, including more than 100,000 life science reagent products. The company has an Asian operations center in the Shanghai Zhangjiang Biomedicine Base and a European subsidiary in Sweden, building a global sales network.

Industry Impact

MedChemExpress products are widely used by scientific research institutions around the world, including cutting-edge academic journals such as Cell, Nature, and Science. Meanwhile, The activity data of drug small molecules and targets provided by MedChemExpress have been cited by multiple academic databases, including Pubchem, Genecards, et al.

In March 2025, Cancer Cell published a paper jointly published by Nanjing Medical University and Fudan University, "Hypoxia inducible factor-1a drives cancer resistance to cuproptosis", which explored the role of HIF-1α as a copper death resistance driver in tumors. This article used MCE's Elesclomol, Tetrathiomolybdate, Disulfaram, NSC319726, Cycloheximide, BAY-876, STF-31, PX-478.

In Aug 8, 2024, the journal Cell published an article titled "Preclinical proof of principle for orally delivered Th17 antagonist miniproteins ", which designed a mini-protein that inhibits IL-23R and IL-17, which can be orally administered and produced at low cost, and has good pharmacokinetic (PK) and biodistribution characteristics in rats. The article used MCE's Secukinumab and Bimekizumab, and details can be found in the "STAR+METHODS" section of this article.

In March 2025, the journal Nat Genet. published an article titled "The transcriptomic architecture of common cancers reflects synthetic lethal interactions". Based on the molecular profile data of more than 9,000 cancers and the combination of synthetic lethal screening, it was found that the transcriptome buffering of tumor suppressor gene (TSG) deletion can be achieved by overexpression of synthetic lethal partners. The article used MCE's Saruparib (AZD5305) as an anti-cell proliferation agent (inhibiting the growth of DNA repair-deficient cells) to inhibit the growth of SUM149 or CAPAN1 cells. For details, see the 'SUM149 and Capan1 genome-wide CRISPR–Cas9 screens section' of the Result chapter in this literature.

Product Matrix

MCE provides life science biochemical products, including ~100,000 bioactive compounds, fluorescent dye , peptides, recombinant protein , kits and natural compounds for laboratory and scientific purposes.

MCE also provides compound library services (including DNA-encoded libraries, fragment libraries, and natural product libraries) to support high-throughput screening (HTS). In a report on influenza A virus research published in 2024, the ''MedChemExpress compounds prevent neuraminidase N1 via physics- and knowledge-based methods'', researchers used about 10 000 compounds in the MCE database to evaluate the ligand binding affinity of neuraminidase inhibitors and obtained the physical mechanism of the ligand-neuraminidase binding process.