Welch Foundation gives $1.6 million for drug research

Welch Foundation gives $1.6 million for drug research

FROM RICE NEWS REPORTS

Thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the Welch Foundation, a coalition of six Gulf Coast institutions that includes Rice University will launch a new initiative to develop a computational chemistry research program.

The program, part of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC), aims to produce innovative computational and chemical techniques that will speed the development of new drugs and molecular tools for biomedical science.

The grant will fund multiple projects that bring together scientists involved with biomedical research and drug discovery: computational chemists, who work to produce computer models of real chemical systems that can be used to predict molecular properties; synthetic chemists, who specialize in building molecules designed for specific purposes; and biologists investigating systems that can be applied to molecular intervention. Such studies are often the first step in the development of new drugs.

“We’re very grateful to the Welch Foundation for this gift, which continues its traditional mission of supporting the science of chemistry in Texas and also makes it possible for us to do medicinal chemistry that can have a real benefit for human health,” said University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) professor Scott Gilbertson, the project’s principal investigator.

“We think that collaborations between computational groups and synthetic groups in this area will promote better computing methods to predict molecular structure and function as well as better synthetic methods to check the computational predictions,” Gilbertson said. “At the same time, we’ll be working on the first steps of discovering new drugs and scientifically useful small molecules.”

Other GCC researchers also expressed their gratitude for the Welch Foundation’s grant.

“With this gift, the Welch Foundation not only opens new opportunities for both collaboration and discovery based in chemistry, but also continues its rich history of support for chemistry in Texas,” said Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice and chair of the oversight committee of the Gulf Coast Consortia. “The GCC community deeply appreciates the generous support of the Welch Foundation in this new and exciting endeavor in chemical genomics.”

Gilbertson said the studies funded by the program will focus on small molecules’ effects on protein-protein interactions. Interactions between protein molecules are critical to many cellular processes. Developing molecules to control such interactions is becoming a central area in understanding cellular function as well as the discovery of important therapeutics.

The new program will complement the overall efforts of the GCC, a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience research and training that includes UTMB, Rice University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Houston.

Established in 2006 with a $2.7 million gift from the John S. Dunn Foundation, the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics gives academic investigators at GCC institutions access to technologies and resources traditionally limited to the pharmaceutical industry, including sophisticated robotic screening systems and very large collections of compounds and reagents.

Chemical genomics is an emerging field that combines high-throughput molecular screening techniques and the vast quantity of information generated by the mapping of all the genes present in humans and other organisms to give novel insights into biological systems and provide a new foundation for drug discovery.