University Of Pittsburgh Chosen By NCI As One Of Three Pioneer Sites ForBiocombinatorial Chemistr...( ew potential drug targets. Biocombinat...),Health

ew potential drug targets. Biocombinatorial chemistry is the most comprehensive approach to designing highly specific drugs that work," said John S. Lazo, Ph.D., principal investigator on the grant, Allegheny Foundation professor and chairman of the university's department of pharmacology and co-director of UPCI's Molecular Therapeutics/Drug Discovery program. "Biocombinatorial chemistry offers a stark contrast to current methods of drug discovery, which have a long lag time from drug synthesis to application in the clinic with patients. By contrast, biocombinatorial chemistry is expected to offer the public optimally effective, safe medications quickly," he added.

Biocombinatorial chemistry exploits the discovery of genes and their proteins, which serve as molecular targets for drugs because they control biological processes that often lead to disease.

"With this approach, we start with a chemical compound called a platform that locks onto a specific molecular target. We change the platform incrementally to quickly produce hundreds of compounds that we can screen against that given target," said Peter Wipf, Ph.D., co-investigator on the grant and professor in the department of chemistry, where he directs the Combinatorial Chemistry Center. "Through this process, we can readily learn what specific compound structure is best at disrupting a biological pathway."

"Biocombinatorial chemistry has particular importance for diseases like cancer, where you want to provide a highly specific drug that will effectively and selectively kill tumor cells without damaging other healthy cells and potentially creating dangerous side effects," added Dr. Lazo.

This new approach to drug discovery combines university expertise in genomics (the discovery and classification of new genes), chemical design and synthesis, biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, computer modeling and robotics with expertise from faculty at Carnegie Mellon U
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Contact: Lauren Ward
wardle@msx.upmc.edu
412-624-2607
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
21-Oct-1998

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