Our training program is an inter-institutional effort designed to provide a common, broad base of interdisciplinary training in the general area of drug design and development to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with individual expertise in one or more of the following specific area(s): one of the contemporary biomedical sciences, chemistry, computer science, informatics, mathematics, or a related discipline.  As such we are seeking individuals who wish to build upon a strong grounding in a specific discipline(s) to obtain the interdisciplinary training that will enable them to lead future efforts to conceptualize new therapeutic targets and efficiently and effectively develop corresponding drugs with high probabilities of reaching the market as safe, efficacious agents.  We thus seek creative, highly motivated trainees with the potential and desire to work in interdisciplinary teams of scientists in this broad area.   A description of our program taken from the training grant application is provided below for further information. 

Support is provided for 9 predoctoral and 6 postdoctoral positions to establish a training program in the interdisciplinary area of Pharmacoinformatics.  This program is proposed because current approaches to the discovery of new drugs have not fully capitalized on advances in bioinformatics, genomics, computing and other fields, and consequently, the rate of drug discovery has lagged behind breakthroughs in these areas.  The pipeline of new drugs under development has not increased in recent years, and a very small number of new drugs are thus responsible for bearing the enormous costs of an increasingly expensive process that evolved prior to development of massive amounts of new information and the ability to integrate it into usable and accessible systems.  We propose a comprehensive, integrated program to train the next generation of scientists to: (1) use informatics approaches to identify biomolecules that are candidates for drug targeting, (2) use structural genomics, chemoinformatics, and structure-based design to develop families of chemicals to target selected biomolecules and structures, and (3) use ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, and toxicity) profiling and computational predictions of efficacy to select viable drug candidates prior to biological testing. 

For information about
the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC),
other Keck Center Training Programs,
and
the GCC Research Consortia,
please go to GCC Home