Thanks to a $9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery will open tomorrow.
The center will create opportunities for chemists, biologists and engineers at Penn to search for "active" molecules, which may interact in important ways with other compounds.
Researchers will have access to hundreds of thousands of molecules from the NIH's database, from which they hope to identify and analyze particularly active molecules.
Scott Diamond, director of the center and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, described the center and the research conducted by its scientists as highly collaborative and innovative.
"If you look at the way that people do research, often times you'll have biologists studying cells and chemists studying diseases. The tools that you have to study molecules have traditionally been employed in the pharmaceutical industry," Diamond said.
However, with the opening of the center, located in the Vagelos Research Laboratories at 3340 Smith Walk -- which Diamond described as a nucleus to the various research facilities at Penn -- scientists will no longer have to work separately on related projects that traditionally were pursued primarily by researchers in the pharmaceutical industry, not by researchers affiliated with the University.
The NIH gave eight other grants to similar research centers throughout the country, all of which will create public molecular databases for scientists who wish to study specific sets of molecules.
"The idea is not to compete with pharmaceutical companies ... to make drugs, but [to make] tools to understand biology and nature. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in this, they want to make a drug, to make money," Chemistry professor Eric Meggers said.
Diamond hailed the grant awarded to Penn as a product of an "interdisciplinary project" undertaken by faculty members of the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He added that the funding was crucial to the establishment of the center at Penn.
One of the projects that Penn researchers will focus on is identifying new active molecules by testing hundreds of thousand molecular compound collections against particular targets. These newly discovered active molecules -- called "hits" -- will then be analyzed by chemists using automation equipment.
Researchers hope that the hits will facilitate breakthroughs in biological and pharmaceutical research. Diamond added that unlike pharmaceutical companies that conduct research when developing medical therapies, the methods the center will use allow for researchers to avoid animal testing.
