News & Events: Latest News
Source: UCSF School of Pharmacy
October 15, 2009
UCSF Researchers Join Consortium to Target Cancer in New Ways
Scientists from the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry have been selected to lead a new federal initiative aimed at developing new classes of drugs to target cancer.
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), “To advance the NCI’s mission of bringing novel therapies to patients, and to fully exploit NCI’s expertise in the later stage of preclinical development, the Institute is now focusing efforts and resources on drug candidate identification and optimization to enhance the entry of early-stage drug candidates into the NCI therapeutics pipeline.”
To accomplish this goal, the NCI is enlisting a nationwide consortium of academic scientists. James Wells, PhD, chair of the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, along with Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry Adjunct Assistant Professor Michelle Arkin, PhD, will lead UCSF’s participation in the new NCI initiative, called the Chemical Biology Consortium (CBC). Wells and Arkin are the Director and Associate Director of Biology, respectively, of the Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC), which is a laboratory that provides innovative approaches to drug discovery for UCSF researchers. The SMDC will be at the heart of UCSF’s consortium work.
Participation in the consortium supports one of the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s current strategic goals, which is to create a new framework for drug discovery and development.
