LEX Company was founded in 2000 in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Our main purpose then was to supply local companies and research facilities custom made materials.  Our products were mostly heterocycles, nucleosides, amino acids, small peptides, aminoboronates as surrogates for amino acids and a slew of exotic molecules for biomedical applications.  We wanted to be challenged by our customers with difficult molecular targets or synthetic problems.  That approach worked well as we were hired later by new customers to solve their research or manufacturing problems.

A few years later and with more experience, we expanded our projects to selective modifications of natural products.  The purpose of these projects was to make standards of their metabolites or to modify the molecules in order modulate their physical and biological properties.  Finally, we stepped in the area of development of new pharmaceuticals based on phytochemicals,  plant metabolites with very diversified biological activities.  Amanitin, viriditoxin, ingenol, euphol, just to name a few.  For example, the picture above shows a model of avermectin, one of our favorites.

We moved in to Phoenix Park in Shirley in October 2008 to set up a kilo lab.  In 2010, we were able to develop a process and to manufacture a high purity cosmetic tetrapeptide on a kilo scale for a customer in France. Since then, we scaled up asymmetric hydrogenation processes for production of chiral rare amino acids in our custom 4 liter glass reactors.  We selected ChemLab Trends, Shrewsbury MA, to manufacture and distribute our “snap” reactors to scientific community.   They are much less expensive than our BuchiGlas Uster BEP-280, but adequate for up to 60 psi operations.

Our projects dealing with phytochemicals demanded from us to upgrade our capabilities in preparative chromatography area.  Presently, we are able to fractionate complex mixtures by using Buchi and Agilent high performance equipment or counter-current Sanki chromatograph.