Small molecules, big players: the National Cancer Institute's Initiative for Chemical Genetics.

Cancer Res
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

In 2002, the National Cancer Institute created the Initiative for Chemical Genetics (ICG), to enable public research using small molecules to accelerate the discovery of cancer-relevant small-molecule probes. The ICG is a public-access research facility consisting of a tightly integrated team of synthetic and analytical chemists, assay developers, high-throughput screening and automation engineers, computational scientists, and software developers. The ICG seeks to facilitate the cross-fertilization of synthetic chemistry and cancer biology by creating a research environment in which new scientific collaborations are possible. To date, the ICG has interacted with 76 biology laboratories from 39 institutions and more than a dozen organic synthetic chemistry laboratories around the country and in Canada. All chemistry and screening data are deposited into the ChemBank web site (http://chembank.broad.harvard.edu/) and are available to the entire research community within a year of generation. ChemBank is both a data repository and a data analysis environment, facilitating the exploration of chemical and biological information across many different assays and small molecules. This report outlines how the ICG functions, how researchers can take advantage of its screening, chemistry and informatic capabilities, and provides a brief summary of some of the many important research findings.

Year of Publication
2006
Journal
Cancer Res
Volume
66
Issue
18
Pages
8935-42
Date Published
2006 Sep 15
ISSN
0008-5472
URL
DOI
10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-06-2552
PubMed ID
16982730
Links
Grant list
N01-CO-12400 / CO / NCI NIH HHS / United States