The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee has been awarded a grant of $5M over the next 3 years (2Q 2024) by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the Structure-guided Drug Discovery Coalition (SDDC).
SDDC is a collaboration between top Structural Genomics centres and top Medicinal Chemistry groups to support structure-guided drug discovery efforts for high-value targets for both malaria and tuberculosis. Medicinal chemists, computational chemists, structural biologists, biologists and DMPK experts work together to discover and progress novel scaffolds and chemical series, informed by crystal structures and expert biological input.
SDDC partners work collaboratively across the globe. Typically not co-located, they collaborate in “virtual teams”, working across geographic boundaries, in both academic and industrial institutions, towards common goals.
In particular the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease (SSGCID-Seattle, USA), the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Disease (CSBID-Chicago, USA) and the University of Campinas (Centre of Medicinal Chemistry-UNICAMP, Brazil) provide expertise and support in protein production, assay development and structural biology. The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU-Dundee, UK) at the University of Dundee, has an established track record in tackling infectious and tropical diseases including Malaria and TB. The DDU is leading the coalition and provides medicinal chemistry expertise for the development of the identified hits to “Early Lead” status for the high validated targets of interest.
The coalition collaborate with external body such as MaLDA (Malaria drug accelerator) and TBDA (Tuberculosis drug accelerator).
The MaLDA Consortium is an innovative target-guided discovery platform linking phenotypic hits to function for malaria. MaLDA is a consortium of 15 leading scientific laboratories. The aim of MalDA is to improve and accelerate the early antimalarial drug discovery process by identifying new, essential, druggable targets.
The TBDA is a groundbreaking collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, major universities and research institutions, to facilitate early TB drug discovery.
We collaborate with both MaLDA and TBDA for the selection of the validated targets for both diseases.
We are also open to collaborate with other groups/ organizations to facilitate onwards development of projects, either for particular targets or particular pieces of technology.the Univers