Award Details:
Award Type: Lever
Award #: L-002
Proposal Title: Chicago Tri-Institutional Center of Excellence in Chemical Methodologies & Library Development
PI(s): Sergey Kozmin (UChicago), Karl Scheidt (NU) and Jie Liang (UIC)
Award Amount: $2,000,000.00
Application Cycle: N/A (rolling basis)
Award Start Date: January 1, 2009
Award End Date: December 31, 2011
Abstract:
The CBC has awarded the second Lever Award to a group of scientists from the three CBC member institutions; Sergey Kozmin (UChicago), Karl Scheidt (Northwestern), Hisashi Yamamoto (UChicago), Vladimir Gevorgyan (UIC), Viresh Rawal (UChicago), Milan Mrksich (NU; at UChicago at the time of the award), and Jie Liang (UIC). The $2 million Lever award matches a $9.2 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the establishment and operation of the Chicago Tri-Institutional Center for Chemical Methods and Library Development (CTCMLD). The CTCMLD will provide significant new resources for biomedical research in the Chicago community and boost drug discovery efforts in the area by advancing high-throughput organic synthesis and integrating the production of new small-molecule libraries with broad biological screening.In order to achieve the maximum impact, the CTCMLD will feature a high degree of collaboration and synergy with several research programs at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. Sergey Kozmin (UChicago) will serve as the director of the Center during the initial five year period. The CTCMLD collaborative group will also include exceptional strength in organic synthesis, represented by Karl Scheidt (Northwestern), Hisashi Yamamoto (UChicago), Vladimir Gevorgyan (UIC) and Viresh Rawal (UChicago), as well as the leading expertise in surface engineering of Milan Mrksich (NU; at UChicago at the time of the award) and cheminformatics of Jie Liang (UIC).
CBC Lever Awards are matching grants made to inter-institutional groups that are submitting large-scale grant proposals. Lever Awards are primarily used to establish transformative infrastructure that can be made broadly available to the Chicago scientific community. The CTCMLD represents a high-impact tri-institutional collaboration with projects to be headed by PIs from all three CBC member institutions. The CTCMLD Lever Award will support the following three key initiatives:
1. Enhancing the capabilities of the High-Throughput Synthesis component of the Core Facility of CTCMLD at University of Chicago, by establishing a professionally staffed facility with the state-of-the-art equipment for high-throughput synthesis, purification and analytical characterization of newly generated chemical libraries.
2. Establishing the Hit-to-Lead Development Resource of the CTCMLD at Northwestern University, which will provide unique support for innovative research at the interface of chemistry and biology in Chicago area.
3. Developing a Computational Cheminformatics Core at UIC, which will be used to guide production of small-molecule libraries with favorable physicochemical properties and will facilitate analysis of the compound screening data.
Three cores are available to the CBC research community through the Chicago Tri-Institutional Center for Chemical Methods and Library Development (CTCMLD):
- Library Production Core (located on the University of Chicago campus)
- Hit-to-Lead Development Resource (HLR) (located at Northwestern University)
- Computational Cheminformatics Core (located at the University of Illinois at Chicago)
For more information on the cores click here or go directly to the CTCMLD website.