Gulf Coast Consortia Awards First Discovery Project Pilot Grants,
Will Fund Early-Stage Chemical Genomics Research in Area Labs
HOUSTON – (Jan. 3, 2008)—The John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC CG) has awarded eight researchers in the Houston-Galveston area with its first Discovery Project Pilot Grants in recognition of their outstanding and innovative early-stage work in computational biology and chemistry, which is an increasingly essential step in more rapid drug discovery.
The awards – totaling $280,000 – are funded through a $2.7 million gift in 2006 from the Dunn Foundation to the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience training and research. The GCC is composed of Baylor College of Medicine, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
There were 40 applicants for the awards.
“The recipients of this first round of pilot grant awards represent a very talented and very diverse group of outstanding research scientists. We are excited about the prospect of bringing fresh eyes and a fresh perspective to the GCC’s Chemical Genomics Consortium to help it develop as a valuable resource for all GCC researchers,” said UT Health Science Center Executive Vice President for Research Peter J. A. Davies M.D., Ph.D., who also is co-director of the GCC CG.
David Gorenstein Ph.D., associate dean of research and distinguished professor of biological sciences, UT Medical Branch at Galveston, added, “This is an exciting development for the GCC CG and indeed for all of the GCC. The GCC CG is one of several research consortia of the GCC and demonstrates the commitment of our six institutions to share expensive equipment and resources.”
The UT Health Science Center is the project’s lead institution and will host the GCC CG’s high throughput screening lab on a floor of the UT Medical School’s new, $80.5-million, six-story research facility at 6431-A Fannin St. near John H. Freeman Boulevard in the heart of the Texas Medical Center. “This central facility will provide a major resource for faculty who will first develop screens for a variety of applications in facilities provided by the Dunn GCC for Chemical Genomics at each institution. The first-round recipients were outstanding, and we are looking forward to seeing the exciting results from these seed funds,” said Kathleen Matthews, Ph.D., chair of the GCC Oversight Committee and dean of natural sciences at Rice University.
Winners of the first Discovery Project Pilot Grants, which will help support the innovative, early-stage groundwork needed for developing biomedical treatments that will reverse or prevent diseases, are:
- Alan Brasier, M.D., and co-investigators Sanjeev Choudhary, Ph.D., and Thomas Wood, Ph.D., at UT Medical Branch at Galveston, who are developing a new research avenue in their laboratories to identify, screen and test for oligonucleotide (aptamer) inhibitors of critical regulatory points in the cellular stress response pathways of transcription factor Nuclear factor-kB (NF-kB).
- Austin Cooney, Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine, for “Validation of a HTP ligand screen for the orphan receptor GCNF and characterization of ligands.”
- Michael Davies, M.D., Ph.D., at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, whose research is focused on developing an improved understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of metastatic melanoma, and identifying new therapeutic approaches for this disease. Dr. Davies has developed a model for chemotherapy resistance using human melanoma cell lines. He will perform an siRNA screen to provide insight into mechanisms of chemotherapy resistance in melanoma.
- David S. Loose, Ph.D., and co-investigator Claudio N. Cavasotto, Ph.D., at the UT Health Science Center at Houston, who are searching for chemicals that could either mimic one of at least 18 hormone-like small-molecule signals or block receptors in the “wnt” signaling pathway, which is involved in many aspects of normal growth, differentiation, and tissue remodeling. Dysfunction of this pathway is known to contribute to formation of many cancers, especially colon cancer and breast cancer. “The John S. Dunn award will allow us to actually apply our research strategy and begin to search for these chemicals,” said Loose. “We are confident that the screening funded by the Dunn Award will discover molecules that can change signals in the wnt pathway and provide us candidates we hope to develop into useful agents for treating numerous human diseases.”
- Jianpeng Ma, Ph.D., at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, and co-investigator Qinghua Wang, Ph.D., at Baylor College of Medicine, whose project is “High-throughput Screening for Anti-influenza Inhibitors.” New antiviral drugs are needed to help protect against impending pandemics and seasonal epidemics, and this project proposes identification of promising lead molecules for development of high-potency antiviral drugs.
- Amarnath Natarajan, Ph.D., and co-investigator Kathryn A. Cunningham, Ph.D., at UT Medical Branch at Galveston, who propose to investigate new approaches for therapeutic treatment of mental health disorders by identifying and characterizing hot-spots in protein-protein interactions in the serotonergic system, a primary system implicated in underlying psychiatric disorders.
- David Tweardy, M.D., and Michael Mancini, Ph.D., at Baylor College of Medicine, for “Chemical probes selective for Stat3 alpha,” which is a target for cancer therapeutic agents.
- John Wilson, Ph.D., at Baylor College of Medicine, working on “Chemical Screen for Modulators of Triplet Repeat Instability.” By identifying individual proteins and the molecular pathways they define, his project will help identify lead compounds for the development of preventive and therapeutic approaches for treating a host of devastating human diseases.
GCC CG co-director Michael Mancini, Ph.D., associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine said: “The Discovery Project Pilot Grant Program and the associated generous support we received from the Dunn Foundation is part of a larger effort to promote chemical genomics and drug discovery research at Gulf Coast Consortia institutions. The goal of this program is to enable research teams from the GCC institutions to apply the technologies of high throughput and high content screening to their individual areas of research interest.”
John S. Dunn GCC for Chemical Genomics (GCC CG) was organized in 2003 to address the growing need among Gulf Coast investigators for a centralized capability to support high- throughput screening technologies. This research consortium brings together scientists interested in this area of research, with goals being to develop a basic research arm and translational research arm to develop new leads for therapeutics.
The Dunn Foundation also provides $500,000 in seed funding grants to support innovative, early-stage pilot projects, particularly from young investigators, that will enable them to gather the preliminary data required for successful applications for peer-reviewed funding and publication.
For more information about the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics, see: http://cohesion.rice.edu/centersandinst/gcc/gccddr_about.cfm
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Welch Foundation gives $1.6 million for drug discovery research
GALVESTON, Texas (Sept.11, 2007) -- Thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the Welch Foundation, a coalition of six Gulf Coast institutions is launching a new initiative to develop innovative computational and chemical techniques intended to speed the development of new drugs and molecular tools for biomedical science.
The Welch Foundation funding will enable the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC CG) to establish a computational chemistry research program. The program is designed to fund multiple projects that bring together innovative scientists involved with biomedical research and drug discovery: computational chemists, who work to produce computer models of real chemical systems that can be used to predict molecular properties; synthetic chemists, who specialize in building molecules designed for specific purposes; and biologists investigating systems can be applied to molecular intervention. Such studies are often the first step in the development of new drugs.
“We’re very grateful to the Welch Foundation for this gift, which continues its traditional mission of supporting the science of chemistry in Texas and also makes it possible for us to do medicinal chemistry that can have a real benefit for human health,” said University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) professor Scott R. Gilbertson, the project’s principal investigator. Gilbertson, who also holds one of UTMB’s two Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chairs in Chemistry, said the studies funded by the program will focus on small molecules’ effects on protein-protein interactions. Interactions between protein molecules are critical to many cellular processes. Developing molecules to control such interactions is becoming a central area in understanding cellular function as well as the discovery of important therapeutics.
“We think that collaborations between computational groups and synthetic groups in this area will promote better computing methods to predict molecular structure and function as well as better synthetic methods to check the computational predictions,” Gilbertson continued. “At the same time, we’ll be working on the first steps of discovering new drugs and scientifically useful small molecules.”
The new program will complement the overall efforts of the GCC CG, according to Dr. Peter Davies, executive vice president for research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and co-director of the consortium, which is part of the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience research and training including UTMB, UT-Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Houston. “The GCC CG was created to tackle the problem of finding molecules that can be used either as tools for research or potentially as new drugs, in a collaborative academic setting,” Davies said. “This generous gift from the Welch Foundation will ultimately help us harness the power of computational chemistry to much more efficiently select the compounds that go into our screening centers.”
Dr. Michael Mancini, also a GCC CG co-director and an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine, echoed Davies’ comments, citing as an example the new program’s potential benefits for his own research group. “We are now developing the tools that allow us to screen molecules for important activity at high rates using microscopy-based approaches,” Mancini said. “This grant will help us interface well with the chemists and evaluate new compounds more quickly.”
Other GCC researchers also expressed their gratitude for the Welch Foundation’s gift, including theoretical chemist B. Montgomery Petitt, director of the University of Houston’s Institute for Molecular Design. “Computational chemistry is a real strength in the GCC, and it’s exciting that the Welch Foundation and others support this important chemical design effort,” Pettit said.
“With this gift, the Welch Foundation not only opens new opportunities for both collaboration and discovery based in chemistry, but also continues its rich history of support for chemistry in Texas,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, dean of natural sciences at Rice University and chair of the oversight committee of the Gulf Coast Consortia. “The GCC community deeply appreciates the generous support of the Welch Foundation in this new and exciting endeavor in chemical genomics.”
Established in 2006 with a $2.7 million gift from the John S. Dunn Foundation, the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics gives academic investigators at GCC institutions access to technologies and resources traditionally limited to the pharmaceutical industry, including sophisticated robotic screening systems and very large collections of compounds and reagents. “Chemical genomics” is an emerging field that combines high-throughput molecular screening techniques and the vast quantity of information generated by the mapping of all the genes present in humans and other organisms to give novel insights into biological systems and provide a new foundation for drug discovery.
“From the beginning we’ve had a very active interest in how best to design and create the molecules we put into our screens — what some would call the ‘chemical’ part of chemical genomics,” Davies said. “That’s why we’re so grateful to the Welch Foundation for this commitment to advancing computational and synthetic chemistry, which is going to enable large numbers of scientists to discover new molecules that will be potentially very useful in the treatment of diseases and the process of discovery in biological laboratories.”
Training grant will support education of future neuroscientists
HOUSTON - (Sept. 6, 2007) - A new federal grant will allow Baylor College of Medicine and other institutions in Houston to support the education of future researchers who can apply the tools of mathematics, physics and engineering to the problems of brain research.
The five-year, $727,000 Training in Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience grant is funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. It provides four predoctoral fellowships for graduate students with previous training in mathematics, physics and engineering seeking doctoral degrees. The students will work with mentors who are experts in both theoretical and experimental neuroscience.
"In addition to using theoretical tools, the students will be trained in state-of-the-art experimental methods, specifically those for complex multidimensional data acquisition, processing and visualization, as these are most prominent in advanced imaging techniques," said Dr. Peter Saggau, professor in the Baylor College of Medicine department of neuroscience and director of the new training program.
"Training will be a well-balanced combination of classroom instruction and hands-on labs," Saggau said.
The interdisciplinary, multi-institutional grant is awarded under the auspices of the Gulf Coast Consortia's educational arm, the Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training. Other institutions involved in the training program are Rice University, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, UT Medical Branch in Galveston and the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Twenty-four researchers from these institutions will serve as training faculty.
Young Researchers Take Time Away from the Lab to Help Young Patients
HOUSTON – (March 9, 2007) – For the second year in a row, young Keck Center researchers from several Texas Medical Center institutions, including Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, University of Houston and UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, will exchange lab coats for aprons and microscopes for spatulas as they prepare and serve lunch to young patients and their families at the Ronald McDonald House-Houston on Friday, March 9.
Affiliated with the Gulf Coast Consortia/Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Research and Training, the students normally spend 10-12 hours per day in the lab working on research projects related to nanobiology, molecular biophysics, or pharmacoinformatics, projects that one day may lead to the design and discovery of more effective drugs to treat human cancers. Volunteering at Ronald McDonald House gives them the chance to put a human face on diseases that ultimately benefit from their basic scientific research studies.
Keck Fellows in the GCC/Keck Center, left to right, Jamie Catanese, Wilfredo Ortiz, Carly Levin and Upma Sharma , prepare to serve fajitas to Ronald McDonald House clients.
Gulf Coast Consortium Members to use Invitrogen’s Stealth siRNA Libraries in Screening Centers
Carlsbad, Ca, and Houston, Tx, January 30, 2007 – Invitrogen Corporation (Nasdaq:IVGN), a provider of essential life science technologies for disease research and drug discovery, today announced it has formed a strategic scientific relationship with researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas at Houston, part of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC-CG).
As part of the relationship, consortium members plan to use Invitrogen’s broad gene expression and imaging portfolio to enable discovery of biomedically relevant aspects of gene and protein expression through advanced screening techniques. The screening centers will focus on many aspects of disease-related biology including diabetes, cancer and steroid hormone-related metabolic disorders.
Peter Davies, M.D., executive vice president of research at University of Texas Health Science Center, and director of GCC-CG stated, “Invitrogen’s siRNA screening technologies and their high content, high throughput assays will greatly assist us in a variety of research being conducted by GCC-CG researchers,” a view echoed by Kathleen Matthews, chair of the Gulf Coast Consortia Oversight Committee.
Scientists at core facilities at Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas Health Science Center will use their expertise in high content, high throughput image-based screening and quantitative gene expression, respectively, to maximize the biological content from these experiments. Initial experiments will use Invitrogen’s human kinase, human nuclear receptor, and mouse nuclear receptor collections. The quantitative effects of the siRNA molecules on gene and protein expression will be assessed using Invitrogen’s novel, highly sensitive SYBR GreenERTM real time qPCR technology, and image-based tools from its Molecular Probes TM portfolio.
“Invitrogen is committed to driving gene expression analysis techniques forward,” said Amy Butler, Ph.D., vice president, gene expression profiling, at Invitrogen. “This broad collaboration with renowned research centers allows us to jointly make important contributions to new medical and drug development research.”
Additional participating members of the GCC-CG are Rice University, University of Houston, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Together the six institutions form a larger organization, the Gulf Coast Consortia.
“This partnership allows us to work with many key decision makers in the academic marketplace,” said Lewis Vann, Ph.D, business development manager for Invitrogen’s Consortium Program. “By combining resources and technologies we are maximizing the impact on consortium-based research.”
“Access to Invitrogen’s siRNA library and hardware/software resources for screens that reach down to the individual investigator laboratory is very efficient,” said Michael A. Mancini, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the GCC-CG.
John S. Dunn Foundation’s $2.7 Million Grant Will Boost Drug Discovery at Texas Gulf Coast Institutions
HOUSTON – (November 10, 2006)—The John S. Dunn Foundation has made a gift of $2.7 million to support the acquisition of sophisticated robotics and large collections of chemical compounds and molecular reagents to support drug discovery research by investigators from six Gulf Coast institutions.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will serve as the project’s lead institution on behalf of the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience training and research composed of Baylor College of Medicine, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, the University of Houston, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and UT-Houston.
“This special gift from the Dunn Foundation will propel the research within our GCC institutions forward in new ways and open novel experimental avenues to our investigators across the region,” said Kathleen Matthews, Ph.D., GCC Oversight Committee chair and dean of Natural Sciences at Rice University. “We are deeply appreciative of the on-going support of the Dunn Foundation in our GCC programs.”
The program will be known as the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics. It will jump-start the work of scientists at all of the participating GCC institutions by helping to provide the infrastructure, equipment, genomics libraries and seed grants necessary to speed new drug discoveries.
“This support from the Dunn Foundation will enable the Gulf Coast Consortia to put in place an academic drug discovery program that will speed the translation of basic research discoveries into new avenues for the treatment of human diseases,” said UT-Houston Executive Vice President for Research Peter J. A. Davies M.D., Ph.D.
Davies also is director of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics. “Such collaborative initiatives as these are helping to bring about a major transformation in the framework for biological and biomedical research in our region that will serve as a national model for the research teams of the future,” Davies said.
UT-Houston also will be the home of the hub laboratory for the drug discovery program, where state-of-the-art robotics, instrumentation and computer technology will be employed for rapid screening of chemical compounds to identify drugs that may act on the molecular “targets” known to be associated with specific diseases. The screening center will be located on the third floor of the UT Medical School’s new $80.5-million research building, now under construction at 6431 Fannin St.
“Functional genomic screening will revolutionize the way we identify new targets for drugs to treat cancer and other major diseases. It is a technology available to relatively few research organizations and we are very lucky to have the support of the Dunn Foundation,” said Garth Powis, D.Phil., chairman of the Department of Experimental Therapeutics and director of the Center for Targeted Therapy at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Five GCC satellite centers will each receive funding to purchase robotics and detection systems for compatible research projects at GCC partner campuses.
“The Dunn Foundation gift also helps us to robustly launch the hub-n-spoke model, with funds to support multiple satellite laboratories to enable assay development throughout the GCC,” said Michael A. Mancini, Ph.D., co-director of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics.
Mancini’s group at Baylor College of Medicine was the lead laboratory in pioneering high throughput single cell studies gene transcription, using novel microscopy-based technologies. “Not only is large-scale screening now a possibility, one cannot overestimate the new advantages of higher throughput approaches at the standard bench level,” Mancini said.
“University of Houston researchers in pharmaceutical design are excited about the potential of having a local screening center available. The center will foster a great many interdisciplinary investigations leading to drugs of the future,” said UH Professor of Chemistry B. Montgomery Pettitt, Ph.D., chairman of the Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training, who has been affiliated with the GCC since its formation.
The Dunn Foundation award includes $500,000 in seed funding to support innovative, early-stage pilot projects, particularly from young investigators who are doing the cutting-edge groundwork needed for developing biomedical treatments that will reverse or prevent diseases.
These pilot grants for “Discovery Project” pilot grants will enable researchers to gather the preliminary data required for successful applications for peer-reviewed funding and publication.
Academic drug discovery programs like the GCC’s seek to offset research-and-development expenditures by the pharmaceutical industry ($35 billion in 2005) by involving public-sector players more in the early phases of drug discovery. Ultimately, academic scientists and researchers may shorten the time needed for drug discoveries, develop truly new drugs for a broader range of diseases and lower the costs of pharmaceuticals so savings can be passed on to consumers and health care providers.
“It is a growing trend among top-tier research universities across the nation to establish academic drug discovery programs that accelerate the translation of basic research discoveries into the development of new therapies, said UT-Houston Executive Vice President for Molecular Medicine and Genetics C. Thomas Caskey, chairman of the GCC Chemical Genomics Executive Committee. “We believe that the leadership of our regional Gulf Coast universities in biological and biomedical research both in Texas and nationally will benefit greatly from a comparable commitment to this emerging area of research.”
In 2005 the Dunn Foundation awarded the GCC more than $1.8 million to purchase two of the most powerful nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers in the United States. “This gift continues the generous support of the Dunn Foundation to the Gulf Coast Consortia,” said David G. Gorenstein, Ph.D., director of the John S. Dunn, Sr. Gulf Coast Consortium for Magnetic Resonance and associate dean for research at UTMB’s School of Medicine.
The most comprehensive academic health center in the Southwest, UT-Houston is home to six schools devoted to medicine, nursing, public health, dentistry, health informatics and graduate studies in biomedical science. In addition to the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM), other components are the UT Harris County Psychiatric Center and the Mental Sciences Institute. The UT Health Science Center at Houston, founded in 1972, is part of the University of Texas System. It is a state-supported health institution whose state funding is supplemented by competitive research grants, patient fees and private philanthropy.
Gulf Coast Consortia / Keck Center Recognized with Texas Star Award for Excellence in "Closing the Gaps"
HOUSTON—(Oct. 12, 2005)—Four Houston-area institutions for higher learning, including the Gulf Coast Consortia / Keck Center, are among the six recipients of the prestigious Star Award given annually by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
NIH “Roadmap” Grant Will Train New Drug-Developers at Texas Gulf Coast Institutions
HOUSTON—(Dec. 9, 2004)—With a new $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), six Houston/Galveston-area institutions will begin to train future leaders in drug discovery research. The five-year grant is part of a year-old series of initiatives known collectively as the “NIH Roadmap for Medical Research.”
Rice University and M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Establish Center for Computational Cancer Research
HOUSTON—(Jan. 22, 2004)—Center goal is to speed detection, treatment, and prevention of cancer. Rice University and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center are teaming together to apply high-level computer science to efforts to understand, treat and ultimately prevent cancer.
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