News from SGC

Drug discovery must change to urgently address global health needs

Posted on Monday 11th of December 2017

Oxford researchers call for a new Pharmaceutical Commons

Pharmaceutical research and development (R & D) is one of the best examples of human ingenuity, attracting vast funding, employing brilliant minds, and deploying the most advanced technologies. Over the past century, it has enabled unprecedented advances for human health. Yet the pharmaceutical R & D system is struggling to keep up with society’s medical needs. High failure rates and prolonged research timelines for candidate drugs constitute a human tragedy, and have dramatically increased the cost of drug discovery over the last decades. More and better medicines are desperately needed at a time of global...

SGC and The Neuro Form Open Science Partnership

Posted on Wednesday 6th of December 2017

NeuroSGC created to increase volume and quality of cell assays for drug discovery

A new partnership between the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) will use a unique open science framework to help scientists discover new targets for drug development for neurological diseases.

FFAR Awards $1 Million Grant to Create Open Source Technology for Gene Discovery in Plants

Posted on Monday 4th of December 2017

The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), a nonprofit established in the 2014 Farm Bill with bipartisan congressional support, awarded a $1 million Seeding Solutions grant to University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to study the genetics of rice plants. Together with researchers at the University of North Carolina and collaborators, the team will develop and implement a chemistry-driven gene discovery approach to identify genes that modulate root traits.

The FFAR grant has been matched with funding from the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health, the Structural Genomics Consortium, AgBiome, and Promega for a total $2.3 million investment.

SGC-UNC Collaborates on $2.3 Million Project to Create Open Source Tech for Gene Discovery in Plants

Posted on Monday 4th of December 2017

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hub of the international Structural Genomics Consortium will partner with the University of California, Davis to study the genes of rice plants responsible for root growth. The scientists will create an open source database and lay the groundwork for developing new varieties of drought resistant crops.

Takeda and SGC Announce a Collaboration Agreement Using Patient Tissue-Based Assays for Clinical Target Validation in Irritable Bowel Disease

Posted on Thursday 28th of September 2017

Osaka, Japan, San Diego, Calif., USA, and Stockholm, Sweden, September 28, 2017— Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (“Takeda”) (TSE: 4502), Karolinska Institutet (“KI”) and The Structural Genomics Consortium (“SGC”) today announced a combined pre-competitive and proprietary collaboration to discover and validate new potential intervention points for the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

DiscoverX and the SGC Announce Major Milestone in Development of Kinase Chemogenomic Set

Posted on Friday 4th of August 2017

FREMONT, Calif., Aug. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- DiscoverX Corporation, the leading supplier of innovative cell-based assays and services for drug discovery and development, in collaboration with the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill today announced the completion of an important milestone and extension of their partnership to develop selective and potent chemical probes for the unexplored human kinome.

Kilian Huber receives research award from ThermoFisher

Posted on Thursday 20th of July 2017

On June 5th, 2017, SGC Oxford's Kilian Huber was awarded a Bronze level Thermo Scientific Tandem Mass Tag (TMT) Research Award. The award recognizes scientists conducting innovative research with potential impact in proteomics. The award includes a $5,000 prize to be used towards ThermoFisher reagents.

SGC's Open Science Trust Agreement: A collaboration with UofT's Faculty of Law

Posted on Monday 17th of July 2017

Each semester, SGC-Toronto hosts a team of senior law students from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law as part of an externship clinic to provide the students with experience in open science law while helping SGC draft new agreements that protect our open access ethos and promote our open science. One team of lawyers-to-be under the guidance of law faculty and practicing lawyers redefined 'trust' laws to ensure the usage of SGC's distributed chemical probes remains in the interest of the public. The team published a paper in the Journal Science Translational Medicine on this new mechanism to sharing open science resources.

WIRED article: Big Pharma Buys Into Crowdsourcing For Drug Discovery

Posted on Monday 17th of July 2017

In this piece posted on WIRED on July 17th 2017, Menaka Wilhelm describes the reasons why SGC has chosen to practice "extreme openness" in drug design by sharing data and research material with the world. This open approach is supported by SGC's pharma partners, the pharmaceutical companies that fund and collaborate with the SGC, and by SGC's public funders who collectively recognize the value of open-source science in speeding up drug discovery and ultimately developing new medicines to save patients' lives.

SGC releases TEPs to support research into new drug discovery targets

Posted on Friday 16th of June 2017

June 16th, 2017- SGC’s Target Enabling Package (TEP) Evaluation Group has approved five new TEPs for protein targets related to cancer, metabolic diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders.

TEPs enable scientists to research understudied proteins that have been genetically linked to human disease. The SGC generates and disseminates structural data, assays and other key research information and tools on these proteins to the scientific community.

The five TEPs recently released focus on the following genes: