The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) is comprised of 6 major universities in the Houston-Galveston area: Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), Rice University (RU), the University of Houston (U of H), the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston (UTHSC-H), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (UTMDACC) and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB).

GCC was organized several years ago to promote interdisciplinary educational and research initiatives among the participating institutions. The goal has been to bring together the unique strengths of the six member institutions to build collaborative research and educational programs that operate at the interface between the biological, computational, engineering, and physical sciences. This initiative has resulted in the development of very successful programs in biomathematics and computational biology, in structural biology (both X-ray crystallography and NMR) and membrane biology.

Chemical genomics organized in response to the urgent need to provide academic investigators in the GCC institutions with access to the same cutting edge, high throughput screening and leads discovery resources that are usually available only to scientists in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The GCC has assembled a team of biologists, chemists and informaticists committed to developing an integrated collaborative program to facilitate the discovery and development of new small molecule tools for basic research. 

The theme of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC CG) is to develop a specialized capability in the application of cell-based imaging technologies to chemical genomics research. We are convinced that the marriage of cell-based imaging technologies and high throughput screening, in the form of High Content Screening (HCS), represents a new and very powerful addition to the technologies available for screening of molecular libraries and the identification of chemical probes. As an academic research program, we are interested in exploring how these new technologies can be applied to “non-traditional” targets and to complex biological processes to develop new tools to probe the function of the genome. The ability to engineer diverse fluorescent reporter molecules into living cells, coupled with the capacity to acquire and process large amounts of information on the effects of compound libraries on these cells, provides the much needed opportunity to tackle some of the more challenging problems of chemical genomics. Our strategy is to tailor our organization and its operations to match the priorities and the unique capabilities of an academic research center and to build upon the framework of inter-institutional collaboration embodied in the GCC.

The GCC CG co-directors are Dr. Peter Davies, EVP Research, UT Health Science Center at Houston, and Dr. Michael Mancini, Associate Professor - Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine.  An Executive Committee of senior scientists and research administrators selected for their experience in drug discovery research in both the academic and industrial arena provides oversight.