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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The ALS Association Partners with the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the ALS Society of Canada to Establish the ALS Reproducible Antibody Platform
February 28, 2018
By: Aled Edwards and Aidan Hollis
A recent study claims that almost 1 million Canadians give up food and heat to afford prescriptions. This is just a harbinger of things to come because the current business model that drives the discovery of innovative pharmaceutical treatments requires higher and higher prices. As one example, Luxturna, a new treatment for an eye disease, is priced at a staggering $1 million per course of treatment.
The Neuro-SGC and our collaborators at the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) are using Open Science and sharing to help find treatments to millions of patients with devastating neurodegenerative disorders. Read a review of their approach in this month's issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00047/full
Two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Brazil, Aché Laboratories and Eurofarma Laboratories, have partnered with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Research and Innovation (Embrapii) to fund a medicinal chemistry project at the SGC lab at UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil.
Aché and Eurofarma will each provide R$2.4M funding over six years with R$3.6M from Embrapii to form the Embrapii “Centro de Química Medicinal de Inovação Aberta” (CQMED, English: “Centre for Open Innovation Medicinal Chemistry”).
Kiev, Ukraine and Oxford, UK, 10 January 2018: Diamond Light Source (Diamond) and the Structural Genomic Consortium (SGC) Oxford announced today that Enamine, a chemical company and producer of novel chemical building blocks and screening libraries, will become a key supplier of poised fragment and analogue libraries to its XChem facility. Enamine will offer a new generation of the hit-finding library, Diamond-SGC-iNEXT (DSI) Poised Library to enable fast and productive fragment-based lead discovery(FBLD).
Congratulations to Professor Chas Bountra, Chief Scientist at the SGC Oxford and Professor of Translational Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and who has been appointed OBE for services to Translational Medical Research in the UK's New Year's Honours List 2018.
Professor Chas Bountra, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Affordable Medicines and Chief Scientist at the Structural Genomics Consortium, explains why a new approach to drug discovery and development is needed to address the urgent need for new drugs.
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...
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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.
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.
