Advertise With UsAdvertise on our extensive network of industry websites and newsletters.
Get the PBR newsletterSign up to our free email to get all the latest PBR
news.Researchers at Columbia University are taking part in the second phase of the Protein Structure Initiative, a national effort set up by the National Institutes of Health to identify the roles that proteins play in health and disease.
Subscribe to our email newsletter
The University said it was participating in three of the 10 new research centers that will investigate the three-dimensional shapes of a range of proteins in a bid to discover new ways of designing medicines.
Columbia University will receive $25 million over five years to fund its research contributions.
The Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) claims to start from where the Human Genome Project left off. The idea behind it is that determining a protein’s structure will provide a more efficient way to discover new drugs.
The pilot stage of the PSI set out to develop new approaches and tools that would streamline and speed the generation of protein structures, and to incorporate those new methods into pipelines that turn DNA sequence information into protein structures.
The second stage, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will focus on a production phase during which the new centers will use methods developed during the pilot period to determine thousands of protein structures found in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. It is hoped this will facilitate accurate structure prediction of a larger number of proteins through computer modeling.
David Hirsh, executive vice president for research at Columbia University, commented: “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.”