NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health will support development of new chemical libraries for use in the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network by funding up to eight programs in 2010 with up to $2.5 million.
The "Pilot-Scale Libraries for High-Throughput Screening" grants will fund projects for up to three years with as much as $250,000 in direct costs per year.
NIH plans to use the grants to fund generation of chemical libraries that will increase the diversity, uniqueness, and value of the overall collection in the Molecular Libraries Small-Molecule Repository (MLSMR), which distributes compounds to the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network, both of which are part of the NIH's Roadmap Initiative.
The pilot-scale libraries generated through these grants will be submitted to the MLSMR and then to the MLPCN for evaluation for high-throughput screening, and it is likely that grantees will be given the opportunity to participate in follow-up studies of some compounds.
Researchers may pursue various approaches, including high-throughput synthesis or combinatorial chemistry, isolation and purification of discreet compounds from living organisms (natural products), and target-oriented synthesis, including synthesis of analogs of an NP or other lead compounds.
One high priority for the MLP program is to obtain chemical neighbors of high-value synthetic molecules that are known to be biologically active, NIH said, such as marketed drugs and drugs that have demonstrated biological activity in human clinical trials or animal models but that have not been approved for therapeutic use.