Partnerships - TTP

TTP founded a partnership with IDDD, formerly the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC CG), which was formed in 2003. The Consortium for Innovative Drug Discovery and Development (GCC IDDD) is a research consortium focused on providing support for Houston/Galveston scientists in advancing their therapeutics discoveries through development to the clinic. IDDD support includes collaborative networking and joint funding opportunities, shared core resources, and educational programs. With the desire to maximize screening capabilities while minimizing duplication of effort and resources, the IDDD has supported Gulf Coast investigators with an integrated capability to perform high throughput screening projects.

Currently IDDD is comprised of a shared core network including 11 core facilities from institutions including UT-Austin, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), Rice University (Rice), (University of Houston (UH), University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSC-H), University of Texas Medical branch at Galveston (UTMB-G), and University of Texas at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (UTMDACC). As a member of IDDD, core users can have access to use of facilities located at IDDD member institutions at regular (or internal) rates. This partnership benefited UT-Austin scientists with facile access to more complicated screening such as cell-based image and siRNA in addition to vigorous collaborations across the State of Texas.

• Center for Innovative Drug Discovery, UTSA
• Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program, TAMU
• GCC-Center for comprehensive PK/PD and Formulation, TSU
• GCC Integrated Microscopy Core, BCM
• Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics, TMC
• Antibody Engineering and Expression Core, McGovern Medical School, UTHealth
• GCC Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting Facility, TAMU
• RNA Core, HMRI
• Preclinical Development Core for Large Molecule Therapeutics, UTHealth, McGovern Medical School, UTHealth

TxSACT has been organized as a multi-institutional consortium and as an advanced GCC’s High Throughput Screening Program to provide a collaborative and user-based support with access to cutting-edge drug development core facilities through an award from CPRIT in 2011. The Screening Program reflects the combined vision of a “dream team” of outstanding researchers and informaticians with a common interest in promoting drug discovery research in Texas. It is comprised of three major screening programs to offer specialized capabilities in different aspects of cancer-related drug discovery research, two technology cores to support the activities of the screening programs, and an administrative core to manage the overall operations of the Program.

SGC-UNC is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership that performs basic science of relevance to drug discovery. The scientific focus is the chemical biology of the dark proteome to create chemical inhibitors and screening assays to explore the biology of these understudied proteins from the human genome in health and disease.

A chemogenomic set contained 367 small molecule kinase inhibitors that were previously published by chemists at GSK (named as Published Kinase Inhibitor Set (PKIS)) and was carefully selected to maximize chemical and biological diversity of the inhibitors; it was made available to the scientific community as a resource to study kinase biology and to uncover potential new targets for drug discovery. Broad profiling at NanoSyn and the SGC Oxford showed that PKIS had activity across over 150 human kinases. To date over 50 peer-reviewed papers have been published that report on the use of PKIS in the biomedical research. A second chemogenomics set of kinase inhibitors from GSK, Takeda, and Pfizer was assembled as PKIS2, which contained 645 inhibitors and included many additional chemotypes that were not represented in the original set; it was also made widely available to the scientific community. PKIS2 was profiled using the DiscoverX KINOMEscan affinity capture technology and shown to index 250 human kinases.

TTP is a registered member of ADDC, a collaborative network among the growing number of university-led drug discovery centers and programs.