NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bayer today said that its Bayer HealthCare business has joined the non-profit Structural Genomics Consortium.
Bayer will provide funding to the consortium to accelerate drug research in the areas of protein science and epigenetics. In addition, it will collaborate with the consortium on research projects to identify small molecules that can interfere with protein activity involved in epigenetic control. Bayer also said that ti will provide a subset of its compound library to the SGC for screening.
The SGC is an international effort to make genomic data publicly available for use in structural and chemical biology research. It is comprised of a network of over 200 researchers from the University of Toronto and Oxford University, and among its pharmaceutical partners are AbbVie, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, and Takeda.
The SGC has an "impressive record in providing protein X-ray structures and chemical probes for epigenetics research," Hanno Wild, head of candidate generation and exploration for Bayer HealthCare Global Drug Discovery, said in a statement. "While advancing the field by discovering new probes, we hope to gain a better understanding of disease processes and find new starting points for drug discovery programs to speed up the development of new medicines in areas with a high unmet medical need."