Armed with slightly more than $11 million in grant money, three Chicago-area universities are joining forces to create state-of-the-art chemical libraries that can be used to identify new drug compounds. The University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago are developing the Chicago Tri-Institutional Center for Chemical Methods and Library Development with money from the NIH and the Chicago Community Trust. The center will test small molecules for use against a range of diseases.
"In order to develop new drugs, you need to start with new compounds," said Center Director Sergey Kozmin, Associate Professor in Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Kozmin is also developing a facility that can reduce the amount of time it takes to synthesize a molecule to just a fraction of what it requires today.
- read the report from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News