UCLB News

UCLB proof of concept funds help establish UCL drug target and screening facility

9 March 2010

Jointly funded by UCLB and the Capital Infrastructure Fund (CIF), the recently established ChemiBank facility in the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at UCL is a fantastic new resource for identifying small molecule ligands for proteins.

The facility provides a range of chemoinformatic and biological assay services for early drug discovery projects with the potential to progress existing projects in lead selection and library design.

Tens of thousands of compounds selected by medicinal chemists are available for screening. ChemiBank is already assisting a number of high profile projects within the UCL research community and is also available to support external clients in industry or academia.

Professor David Selwood said: “Small molecule drug discovery has been thought to be the province of industry, but with the setting up of UCL ChemiBank we are bringing it within reach of UCL scientists. With CIF and UCLB funding we’ve established a virtual and real screening facility. We use a new way of finding leads called fragment based screening. These leads can then be optimized into potent inhibitors. The advantage for academic groups is that the process is cheap, quick and efficient. It’s well within the budgets of project and program grants. It’s also a good fit with UCL’s strategy for translational research. We know that UCL’s researchers identify great drug targets- now we can do something about it.”

This brand new facility is one of a number initiatives at UCL in translational research, aimed at increasing the impact of research ultimately for the benefit of society.

Link
Visit ChemiBank at the Wolfson Institute

Further information
For further information please contact Dr. Carol Harty, Business Manager, UCL Business on 020 7679 9000, (c.harty@uclb.com)