New Jersey Health Foundation awards $35,000 to Rutgers University.
Rutgers University’s Office of Translational Sciences has secured a grant worth $35,000 from the New Jersey Health Foundation.
The money will go towards establishing a so-called Fragment Based Drug Discovery core facility at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The facility will be funded through the grant and other money from university units. The university will buy a fragment library as well as a library of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved small molecule drugs.
The facility will be available for all faculty across the university with the hope that it will advance drug development. Fragment-based drug discovery allows for a better understanding of disease pathways and can serve as the starting point for drug candidates. Specifically, the university is hoping the purchase of the libraries will allow its researchers to analyse already approved drugs to repurpose them.
New Jersey Health Foundation is a non-profit with a focus on biomedical research and other health-related education programmes.
David Kimball, associate vice-president at Rutgers’s Office of Translational Sciences, said: “This new core capability leverages existing university assets, allowing biomedical research faculty to investigate and understand potential drug targets at a molecular level. The data they derive from these experiments will enable the design of small molecule probes and potential drugs. By making both the fragment and the FDA-approved drug libraries available to faculty institution-wide, New Jersey Health Foundation has become a catalyst for drug discovery and development research here at Rutgers University.”