The company has established functional assays for orphan GPCRs and uses state-of-the-art chromatography and mass spectroscopy to purify and identify the natural ligands.

Several projects to further improve the drug discovery platform are under development.

IriDM is developing a peptidomics approach to identify bio-active peptides from complex mixtures.

All tissue fractions (even the very complex primary ones) will be fully scanned by mass spectrometry. This will generate a (long) list of the masses of all components in any fraction. These will be mined for patterns that correlate with bio-activity. If a particular mass is consistently present in all fractions that tested positive, but absent in all negative fractions, that is a good candidate for the mass of the bio-active peptide. The patterns of course could be more complex, because a bio-active peptide may have several variants with different masses, or the amount of peptide present in a particular fraction may be too small to activate the receptor. Using mass spectrometry, one can focus on a single mass peak in a complex mixture and analyse it more fully, e.g. by fragmenting it further so as to determine the sequence of the underlying peptide.

Currently, bio-active peptides are fully purified before their sequence is identified. This requires five, six or sometimes even more successive chromatographic purification steps, which is time-consuming and laborious. Identification of the bio-active peptide before it is fully purified would therefore save considerable time and effort and would also require less starting material.

IriDM works with PharmaDM to close the loop between in silico and wet lab drug discovery in a program named the "robot scientist".