New Mexico Team Named for NIH Roadmap Center: ChemDiv Supports Collaboration With Medicinal Chemistry Services
SAN DIEGO and ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., July 11 /PRNewswire/ — A New Mexico team
has been awarded a $9 million dollar three-year grant from the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop the New Mexico Molecular Library
Screening Center (NMMLSC). The NMMLSC center is part of NIH’s “Roadmap”
initiative aimed at putting medical discoveries on the fast track to improving
health as well as making research more understandable. The NMMLSC will be
centered at the UNM Health Sciences Center, with major HSC components in the
UNM Cancer Research & Treatment Center (CRTC), the UNM College of Pharmacy,
and the Division of Biocomputing of the School of Medicine. The NMMLSC will
be part of a network of nine national facilities working to identify the most
compelling opportunities in three main areas: new pathways to discovery,
research teams of the future, and re-engineering the clinical research
enterprise.
The director of the NMMLSC Larry Sklar, Ph.D. and Director of Research at
the UNM CRTC, said, “This is an important step for the scientific process in
going from individual scientists working in small groups to teams of
interdisciplinary networks across the country working together.” Dr. Sklar
added, “In this Center, we will discover small molecules that target important
biological processes. The targets come from the NIH community and our Center
will perform screens on these targets with small molecules. We will then use
chemistry to optimize activities of these small molecules and output data back
to the NIH community. These small molecules can be used as probes, imaging
agents and leads for new drug molecules.”
The Division of Biocomputing, established through the assistance of the
New Mexico Tobacco Settlement, will provide informatics support to the Center.
Tudor Oprea, MD, PhD, Director of the Office, said, “This is truly a team
effort where work to evaluate small molecules, both virtually and physically,
are integrated. We will continue our successful partnership with ChemDiv Inc.
in order to identify and optimize new molecular probes.” Larry Sklar added
that “UNM’s long standing collaboration with ChemDiv, a San Diego based
research contract organization, has been essential to gaining the NIH grant.”
ChemDiv provides UNM with access to Discovery outSource(TM) a full service
drug discovery capability encompassing; synthetic and medicinal chemistry;
pre-clinical development; diverse and focused screening libraries; global
logistics and sample management services.
The Center team includes researchers from New Mexico State (Jeffrey
Arterburn and Pete Herndon), New Mexico Tech (Alex Kornienko), and ChemDiv
(Alexander Kiselyov). Scientists from other UNM departments will include
Bruce Edwards and Larry Sklar from Pathology, Eric Prossnitz from Cell Biology
and Physiology, Tudor Oprea, David vander Jagt and Robert Royer from
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Lorraine Deck and Wei Wang from
Chemistry, Herbert Tanner from the School of Engineering and a new senior
medicinal chemistry recruit from the College of Pharmacy.
About ChemDiv, Inc.: ChemDiv Incorporated (ChemDiv) with headquarters in
San Diego, USA is a global chemistry-driven contract research organization
focused on the delivery of new scientific innovation and products and services
that meet the drug discovery needs of its partners.
For further information about ChemDiv, please visit www.chemdiv.com.
SOURCE ChemDiv, Inc.
-0- 07/11/2005
/CONTACT: Cathleen Rineer-Garber, Communications and Publications Manager
of UNM Health Sciences Center, +1-505-272-5654, CGarber@salud.unm.edu; or
Natalie Ikizalp, Business Development/Project Manager of ChemDiv, Inc.,
+1-858-794-4860, nni@chemdiv.com/
/Web site: http://www.chemdiv.com /
