NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Genome Canada announced today that it has partnered with various pharmaceutical companies to provide C$33 million ($24.6 million) in new funding to the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public/private group conducting publicly available basic research to advance drug discovery.
According to Genome Canada, it is providing C$11 million to the SGC, with an additional C$5 million coming from the government of Ontario and C$17 million from pharmaceutical partners. The consortium plans to use the funding to continue expanding its open science collaborative network to include disease and patient foundations, partner with clinicians and research hospitals to test its chemical probes on patient samples to help validate new drug targets, and provide training in early-stage drug discovery to young scientists.
"SGC has a proven track record of delivering their objectives," Genome Canada President and CEO Marc LePage said in a statement. "Over the next years, Canadian hospitals are joining the SGC to expand its network of open science. This network will accelerate our ability to identify potential new drug targets and therapeutic strategies for diseases including cancer, inflammatory bowel diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington disease."
Current members of the SGC, which was launched in 2003, include AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Genome Canada, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Lilly Canada, the Novartis Research Foundation, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, Pfizer, Takeda, and the Wellcome Trust.