Overview

The Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program was launched in 2009 by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC).

CREATE ChemNET, a Medicinal Chemistry Network in Epigenetics, is a Training Program that will provide Chemistry graduate students and post-doctoral fellows the opportunity to gain practical medicinal and biological chemistry experience. The Trainees will collaborate with leading-edge drug discoverers in industry and scientists at the “Epigenetics Chemical Probes Consortium” led by one of the top Chemical Biology laboratories in Canada, The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC). The Trainees will generate research tools to study the science of epigenetics, a fundamental gene regulatory mechanism that influences diseases such as cancer, depression and diabetes, as well as bioenergy, livestock science and agriculture. The chemical tools generated will be made available to all researchers without restriction on use, as part of a world-leading movement in open access science.

Objectives

ChemNET’s Objectives Translate to Opportunities for Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows:

1. To gain hands-on training on equipment and methodologies in biology and structural biology
2. To contribute to chemical probes that further our understanding of the role of epigenetics in disease in an open collaborative network of scientists
3. To expand publication portfolio in high-impact journals, for example, the development of JQ1 a chemical probe to the BET family of bromodomains by Panagis Filippakopoulos, a PDF at SGC Oxford. This paper has been cited >95 times since it was published in December 2010, and played a key role in advancing a novel cancer therapy into clinical trials (Clinical trial# NCT01587703).
4. To gain exposure in multi-disciplinary environments
5. To obtain networking opportunities