|
Featured News and Events
| Index of
press releases
Columbia University Takes Leading Role in
Second Phase of NIH Protein Structure Initiative
NEW YORK, NY, July 5, 2005 -- Researchers at Columbia University are
taking a major role in the second phase of the National Institutes of
Health’s Protein Structure Initiative, leading or participating in
three of the 10 new research centers announced Friday by the National
Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).
The Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) is a national effort to
determine the three-dimensional shapes of a wide range of proteins.
This structural information will help reveal the roles that proteins
play in health and disease and will help point the way to designing new
medicines.
Selection of the centers, slated to receive about $300 million over the
next five years, marks the second half of the decade-long initiative.
Columbia University will receive about $25 million over five years to
fund its research contributions.
“The overall idea of PSI is a bit like the Human Genome Project in that
the information gained from these large-scale efforts will underpin a
more efficient approach to medical research in the future,” said Wayne
Hendrickson, Ph.D., University Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and leader of
one of the new centers. “Drug discovery has been lagging in recent
years, and many of us believe that the development of drugs based on a
protein’s structure is a much more efficient way to find the drugs we’d
like to have.”
The Protein Structure Initiative essentially starts from where the
Human Genome Project left off. “Genes are important only in that they
produce proteins, which are the tiny three-dimensional machines of
life,” says Lawrence Shapiro, Ph.D., associate professor in the
Departments of Opthalmology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics
at CUMC, and a principal investigator of one of the new centers. “This
project will enable us to see thousands of proteins in the form in
which they actually do their work.”
When the PSI established its pilot centers beginning in 2000, its goal
was twofold: to develop innovative approaches and tools, such as
robotic instruments, that streamline and speed many steps of generating
protein structures, and to incorporate those new methods into pipelines
that turn DNA sequence information into protein structures.
Now, according to the NIH, the focus shifts to a production phase
during which the new centers will use methods developed during the
pilot period to rapidly determine thousands of protein structures found
in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. These efforts will
facilitate accurate structure prediction of a much larger number of
proteins through computer modeling.
““We hope that the PSI will allow us to develop a new view of the
relationships between protein sequence, protein structure, and protein
function that will ultimately make the three-dimensional structures and
functions of most proteins predictable from the protein sequence” said
Barry Honig, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics
at CUMC and the bioinformatics leader of the Northeast Structural
Genomics Research Consortium.
“We are proud to be contributing to this important effort that is
harnessing the brightest minds across a spectrum of scientific
disciplines,” said David Hirsh, Ph.D., executive vice president for
research at Columbia University. “Through this collaborative research
we will gain greater insight into how proteins function and their
evolutionary interrelationships, ultimately leading to the
identification of new targets for drug design.”
Columbia researchers will play major roles in the following centers:
- The New York Consortium on Membrane Protein
Structure, led by Wayne Hendrickson, University Professor of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical
Center. Other Columbia researchers include: Drs. Burkhard Rost, Barry
Honig, Lawrence Shapiro, Eric Gouaux, Ming Zhou, John Hunt, and Filippo
Mancia.
- The Rutgers-led Northeast Structural Genomics
Consortium, led by Professor Gaetano Montelione of Rutgers University.
Montelione and his consortium partners previously conducted a $36
million NIGMS pilot program that developed new tools that will now be
utilized in this second phase of the project, which focuses on
cancer-related proteins. Columbia contributors include
bioinformaticians Burkhard Rost, Ph.D. and Dr. Honig, the consortium’s
director of bioinformatics; Dr. Hendrickson, the consortium’s director
of crystallography, and Drs. Peter Allen, Liang Tong, John Hunt, and
Andrew Laine from Columbia University.
- The New York Structural Genomics Research Consortium
(led by Structural GenomiX, Inc, a company co-founded by Drs. Honig and
Hendrickson). Dr. Shapiro, will help in high-throughput structure
determination, focusing particularly on structures of phosphatases, a
type of protein frequently important in disease.
###
Index of
press releases |
|