The collaboration aims to combine the malaria drug data and informatics technology of Collaborative Drug Discovery with the drug discovery expertise of the St. Jude department of chemical biology and therapeutics.
The collaboration is designed to help scientists screen millions of chemicals faster, based on their structure and their chemical and biological properties, to find those that are most likely to make effective anti-malaria drugs.
Kip Guy, chair of the St. Jude department of chemical biology and therapeutics, said: “Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) databases will probably help us reduce the number of potential molecules we will need to analyze from tens of millions down to hundreds of thousands. Our own screening capability will significantly reduce that to a much smaller number of promising compounds. This will be a widely used database. We are already making the data freely available through CDD so that other researchers can use different analytical strategies to identify potential new anti-malarial drugs.”