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Broad Institute awarded grant to develop chemical probes for human biology and disease
Date:9/2/2008

Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network (MLPCN), where vast collections or "libraries" of small molecules will be screened using high-throughput methods to identify compounds with interesting biological functions.

The NIH award reflects a new chapter in an already rich history of chemical biology and small-molecule screening at the Broad Institute, one that first began at the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (ICCB) in 1997. The ICCB, which became a founding asset of the Broad Institute when it was launched in 2003, created the first large-scale, public, small-molecule screening center and served as a model for future initiatives. "At the Broad, we are truly fortunate to have a group of individuals with world-class expertise in nearly all facets of professional, high-throughput, small-molecule science," said Schreiber. "Indeed, we couldn't undertake this work without them."

The development of small molecule probes is an intensive effort that involves more than high-throughput screening of molecular libraries. Before screens can be carried out, months of meticulous work are needed to lay the necessary scientific groundwork. Will chemicals be tested in test tubes or cells? How will the biological effects of small molecules be measured? At the Broad Institute, many of these questions can be addressed by leveraging the power of large-scale approaches such as global gene expression-based screening and high-content cellular imaging.

Once the preliminary work is complete and a screen begins, Broad researchers ensure that all of the data are captured digitally and deposited in public databases. The ICCB and the

Broad Institute pioneered this type of public data sharing through their creation of ChemBank, and more recently researchers at the Broad have been contributing to a second public database, PubChem, which is associated with the Molecular Libraries and Imaging Initiative. Follow-up work, including further
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Contact: Nicole Davis
ndavis@broad.mit.edu
617-258-0952
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Source:Eurekalert

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