PITTSBURGH, June 15 The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has received $9 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish the University of Pittsburgh Molecular Libraries Screening Center (UP-MLSC). The center is one of nine in the nation that will create the most sophisticated methods for rapidly assessing hundreds of thousands of compounds for their biological activities and therapeutic potential a capability that has until now been limited almost exclusively to pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, to help speed the use of promising targets for drug development, all information collected by the centers will be freely available to the entire scientific community through PubChem, a comprehensive database that has been established by the NIH.

As part of NIH's Roadmap, which has as its overarching theme "New Pathways to Discovery," NIH has allocated $88.9 million over the next three years to create the Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network (MLSCN). NIH selected nine outside institutions as pilot centers to be included in the network, as well as NIH's Chemical Genomics Center. Each center will work to develop the necessary tools conducting so-called high throughput screenings of molecules which by the third year will allow each center to screen up to 100,000 molecule compounds using 20 different approaches, or assays, that help determine how these compounds interact with molecular targets, within cells, and are involved in regulating events that may be the root cause of different diseases.

Pitt's center takes advantage of close ties between the School of Medicine's Department of Pharmacology and the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry, along with new facilities devoted to drug discovery in the newly constructed Biomedical Science Tower-3. It also represents a unique collaboration with neighboring Carnegie Mellon University and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and provides the U
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15-Jun-2005

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