NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health plans to support high-throughput screening assay researchers who seek to discover and develop new chemical probes for disease by offering grants to cover expenses.
The Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative will offer researchers access to large-scale automated high-throughput screening centers in the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network and funding for research that will identify small molecules that can be optimized as chemical probes to study the functions of genes, cells, and biochemical pathways.
The program will provide up to $50,000 in direct costs for each award to cover assay implementation costs, including available reagents, travel to screening centers, support for secondary and tertiary screening assays, and initial tests of chemical probes. The project period is limited to two years and NIH will grant up to $25,000 per year in funding.
The Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network includes three types of centers: Comprehensive Centers that are capable of screening 300 to 500,000 compounds per assay and provide structure-activity analysis to identify chemical probes; the Specialized Screening Centers that will provide expertise and experience in specific technologies needed to implement complex and technically difficult assays; and Specialized Chemistry Centers with medicinal and synthetic chemistry to advance early hits to chemical probe status.
More information about the NIH solicitation is available here.