NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - Seattle-based Infectious Disease Research Institute announced today it has received a multi-million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use "chemical genomics" medium- and high-throughput screening approaches to identify candidate targets against tuberculosis.
IDRI will identify and evaluate promising new drug-like compounds, which are active against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with the goal of identifying new leads and new drug targets for further development. Ultimately the findings could lead to new therapies against the disease that kills about 2 million people each year.
The grant is part of the Foundation's TB Drug Accelerator program. Financial and other terms of the grant were not disclosed.
The Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative, which IDRI is part of, will provide the institute access to a library of about 800,000 compounds belonging to Eli Lilly. IDRI will leverage its expertise in molecular and microbial biology to identify novel targets for future screening, it said.