Once a researcher identifies an attractive pathway or target, the next step in therapy development often involves identification of compounds that modulate the target or pathway. The process of moving from target/pathway to small molecule drug compounds that can ultimately be used in human patients is daunting to most investigators working in an academic environment. To accelerate such research, the Drug Discovery Unit will offer support through three different core functions:
- High Throughput Screening (HTS) program – We will work with UCI investigators to develop high-quality, reliable, and reproducible assays to be deployed for identification of novel chemical matter by creating a resource center staffed with expert HTS scientists who will fabricate and validate assays appropriate to the task at hand.
- In silico screening – We will perform computational chemistry on promising targets to identify novel chemical matter to set the stage for entry into a therapy development pipeline.
- Medicinal chemistry “hit-to-lead” support – Once HTS assays and/or in silico screens yields hits, we will work with PIs to take hits from in silico screening work forward via structural modeling, and coordinate structure-activity-relationship analysis to derive compound series from “hits”.
The ultimate goal of these efforts is to empower UCI Faculty to successfully pursue more sophisticated translational research, which will lead to novel, patentable intellectual property (IP)