Shamrock Receives SBIR Grant To Develop WAXS

Shamrock has received a phase-I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) for Drug Discovery. It is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, in collaboration with scientists at Argonne National Laboratory’s Biosciences Division.

The goal of the project is to develop the use of WAXS as a routine screening tool for detection of functional interactions between proteins of therapeutic interest and small molecule ligands, for the purposes of drug discovery.

The use of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne during this project, will enable the principal investigators under this grant to maximize productivity and development of the Waxs technique.

Lee Makowski, Waxs Team Leader at Argonne’s Biosciences and Co-Principal Investigator of the grant, said: “Waxs constitutes a new and powerful tool to impact the lead discovery process. The technique is target-general, meaning that a single, standard protocol for the collection of Waxs data can be applied to virtually any protein.”