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Imagine wanting to find out about something and the only library at your disposal had resource materials limited to topics that began with just a handful of letters—"A," "B," and "C," or "M," "N," and "O." Researchers seeking to find new drugs or understand biological processes are in a comparable situation today. In most cases the chemical "libraries" available to them are severely limited in scope, hampering their efforts to find just the right chemical to bond with a particular protein.
The new Boston University Center for Chemical
Methodologies and Library Development (CMLD), recently
founded with a $10.7 million "Centers of Excellence" grant
from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is poised to help
correct this situation.
"This grant," says Tom Tullius, chair of the Chemistry Department, "puts Boston University at the forefront of one of the most exciting frontiers of synthetic organic chemistry: the development of new methods to make highly diverse libraries of organic compounds.
Each "library" is built from a basic chemical structure — often called a "scaffold" — from which thousands of variations are made, each differing slightly from the others as the result of manipulations programmed into the synthesis process.
"These chemical libraries," says Assistant Professor of Chemistry
and Pharmacology John
A. Porco, Jr., who will direct the CMLD, "are
of great interest to pharmaceutical companies in their efforts
to screen for new drugs, as well as to biomedical science
as novel pharmacological tools. The current lack of truly
diverse libraries," Porco continues, "stifles innovation and
limits the directions research can take."
Along with Porco, the CMLD grant includes BU chemists James
Panek, John
Snyder, and Scott
Schaus — each with a different subspecialty
within the field of organic chemical synthesis. Additionally,
Thomas
Gilmore, professor of Biology will direct the
Chemical Library Consortium (CLC), an affiliated group of
biological researchers interested in small-molecule bioprobes.
CMLD chemists will work closely with these researchers to
synthesize chemical libraries with specific characteristics
important for their research.
The BU center will focus on the asymmetric synthesis of complex, natural-product-like scaffolds and molecules and, by coupling such compounds together, will generate libraries having even more complex structures. "We expect that the BU CMLD will become an epicenter of chemical research and training," says Porco, "and will provide molecules of unprecedented complexity for use in biological research." |
