Two trainees from the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) came together this summer to win third place in this year’s Merck Innovation Cup, held in Germany.
Yeojin Kim, a PhD student in Stefan Knapp’s group at SGC-Frankfurt, and Dr. Madison Edwards, a postdoctoral fellow in Rachel Harding’s lab at SGC-Toronto, were selected from a global pool of applicants to take part in the week-long program and to their surprise, they ended up on the same team!
Finding potent chemical hits for disease-relevant human proteins, especially those that have historically been understudied, remains one of the most persistent challenges in small-molecule drug discovery. Traditional approaches rely on expensive and time-consuming experimental screening of vast chemical libraries, often followed by iterative cycles of synthesis and testing. These methods are largely inaccessible to most academic groups and are inefficient for exploring the long tail of the human proteome.
