Structural Genomics Consortium announces $49m new funding to search for new medicines
29 September 2011
Formed in 2004, the SGC is supported by public- and private-sector funding and all of its findings are made available to the global research community without restriction. Since its inception, the SGC has contributed more than 1300 high-quality three-dimensional protein structures to the public domain. This wealth of structural information may help to improve human health by providing research reagents and protocols, and robust frameworks for structure-guided discovery of new medicines for cancer and diabetes, among other diseases and disorders.
Eli Lilly Canada and Pfizer, Inc. have joined as the newest members of the consortium, joining the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, GlaxoSmithKline, the Novartis Research Foundation, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and the Wellcome Trust. Together, these organisations have committed nearly $50m (£32m) to the consortium to sustain another four years of operation. The four pharmaceutical company partners will provide more than $9m (around £6m) worth of in-kind contributions, primarily medicinal chemistry resources, for collaborative discovery of chemical tool compounds that target disease-linked proteins.
The SGC will continue to operate from its founder laboratories at the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Toronto in Canada, as well as benefitting from an extensive network of expert scientific collaborators worldwide.
The SGC scientific programme for 2011-15 continues with a strong protein structure determination effort, while broadening its reach with two innovative new programmes on antibodies and chemical tools. These will focus on epigenetic phenomena - heritable changes in gene function that occur without changes in the underlying DNA sequence. Alterations in these processes are linked to many common diseases, and there is broad agreement that a better understanding of epigenetics may eventually yield new approaches to diagnosing and treating a number of important diseases. Our current understanding of epigenetics is not well advanced, and the availability of such reagents is expected to have great impact on this emerging area of biology.
Building on successful pilot projects, these new SGC research activities will facilitate drug discovery by generating renewable antibodies against human proteins and discovering chemical tool compounds that block the action of specifically targeted human proteins. These efforts critically depend on the SGC's strengths in producing high-quality proteins and determining protein structure. Importantly, SGC antibody and chemical tool reagents will be made available to the worldwide research community on an open access basis.
Image: The structure of protein JmjD2C. Credit: Prof. Udo Opperman, SGC laboratory at the University of Oxford
