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$3 Million ‘Roadmap’ Grant Will Train
Leaders in Drug Research
With a new $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will lead an interdisciplinary effort by six Houston-Galveston area institutions to train future leaders in drug discovery research. The five-year grant is part of a year-old series of initiatives known collectively as the “NIH Roadmap for Medical Research.”
George Stancel, Ph.D.
“Naturally, we’re quite enthusiastic to get a $3 million grant – especially the first time it’s offered as part of a new far-reaching NIH initiative,” said principal investigator George Stancel, Ph.D., dean of the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston (GSBS) and the John P. McGovern GSBS Endowed Professor.
Stancel and colleagues have designed an innovative, interdisciplinary training program to teach new scientists faster, more effective ways of developing drugsand medicines for the future.
“Current approaches to the discovery of new drugs have not fully capitalized on advances in bioinformatics, genomics, computing and other fields, and consequently, the rate of drug discovery has lagged behind breakthroughs in these areas,” Stancel said. “The pipeline of new drugs under development has not increased in recent years – in fact, a much smaller number of new drugs are arriving on the market each year. This is an increasingly expensive process that evolved prior to development of massive amounts of new information and the ability to integrate it into usable and accessible systems.”
Shorter research-and-development time lowers costs and can save the pharmaceutical industry billions of dollars over time, Stancel noted – and savings can be passed on to consumers and health care providers.
The new program will enroll 15 participants – nine graduate students and six postdoctoral fellows – each year from among the member institutions of the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), a collaborative alliance of Baylor College of Medicine, the UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, the University of Houston, the UT Medical Branch at Galveston and the UT Health Science Center.
“No single institution could have managed this program entirely on its own,” Stancel said. “It’s truly collaborative because each of us in the consortium brings into play one or more pieces of the whole that another institution doesn’t have. Together, the complete program is possible.”
Sixty-three faculty from the six GCC institutions will employ an integrated training program that teaches the use of new technological tools (like computer simulations and computational models) to reduce the length of time and the cost of developing new drugs for patients.
The program will train the next generation of scientists to use “pharmacoinformatics” approaches to identify biomolecules that are candidates for drug targeting, and to use structural genomics, chemical profiling and computational predictions of efficacy to select viable drug candidates prior to biological testing.
“What use is a drug if it’s only successful at treating mice? This kind of training offers a thorough appreciation of all aspects of the drug-development process,” Stancel said. “And – by using sophisticated screening techniques and computational models – teams of researchers will more quickly identify and eliminate bad drug-development pathways, so efforts can focus on a drug with a higher probability of being effective and safe as the end result.”
The training program for future leaders in drug discovery research begins in Spring 2005. All qualified GCC graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are eligible to apply. Predoctoral trainees will matriculate and receive first-year support at their home institutions. Stipends will be awarded on a competitive basis for the second through fourth years of graduate training. The home institution will award the Ph.D. degree. Postdoctoral trainees will receive support for two years maximum.
Begun in September 2003, the NIH Roadmap initiatives make available a series of awards that encourage scientists to conduct interdisciplinary research.
“Our program is innovative, unique to the scientific capabilities of the Texas Gulf Coast region, and will provide a model for other institutions training young scientists,” Stancel said. “Of the other 15 successful NIH Roadmap applications, no other is suggestive of this approach.”
By David R. Bates, Public Affairs