The National Institutes of Health is sending about $100 million in grants to San Diego as part of a national biotechnology project that aims to help researchers develop new drugs and therapies by better understanding how genes act and interact within the body.
The grants are part of a $300 million national effort called the Protein Structure Initiative that seeks to find the three-dimensional shapes of all types of proteins.
Knowing the shape will help researchers determine the role different types of proteins play in health and disease. It also will help in designing new medicines so that they fit more tightly into the protein on a molecular level, which makes them more effective.
The findings of the research conducted under these grants will be posted on Internet databases, where other scientists involved in drug discovery would have access to it.
Structural Genomix, a small, privately held biotech company, will be responsible for administering $48.5 million of the grant money. The Scripps Research Institute will administer the other $52.7 million, doling it out to research teams at the University of California San Diego, the Burnham Institute and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation.
The NIH project seeks to take the information obtained under the Human Genome Project, which is essentially a parts list of the genes that make up the human body, and begin to unlock the mysteries of how these genes function, explained Dr. Stephen K. Burley, chief science officer at Structural Genomix. Knowing the structure of the genes is the first step in identifying their function and determining which ones would be good drug targets, he said.
Burley founded the New York Structural Genomics Research Center at Rockefeller University in 2000, when the Protein Structure Initiative was first started. The center was one of ten pilot centers that received five years' worth of funding from the NIH to develop innovative approaches and tools, such as robotic instruments that streamline and speed many steps of determining protein structure.
When Burley joined Structural Genomix in 2002, the NIH allowed him to bring the project with him.
Now that the pilot funding is about to expire, the NIH is giving out a second round of grants. The Structural Genomix and Scripps-based pilot projects are two of four that will be production facilities for the project.
As a production facility, Scripps will provide a higher output of new structure targets, said Ian Wilson, principal investigator on the project at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. As a pilot project, Scripps was generating about 100 structures a year.
At the Scripps production center, scientists will collaborate with colleagues in San Diego's other research institutes to work on a larger number of more technically challenging protein structures that are thought to be very important, Wilson said.
Scientists will be involved in similar projects at Structural Genomix and through the two other production centers – one at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, according to the NIH.
"This will be a highly coordinated effort," said Burley of Structural Genomix. "The targets for structural determination will be mutually agreed upon by the four large-scale centers and the NIH. They will be chosen based upon the goal of trying to cover as many genes as possible."
Terri Somers: (619) 293-2028; terri.somers@uniontrib.com
