Grant: Operating Grant: Industry-partnered Collaborative Research

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is a charitable organization operating out of the Universities of Toronto and Oxford to support drug discovery through pre-competitive, open access research. A significant component of SGC research is in the area of epigenetics, a relatively new field of biology that is thought to hold great promise for the discovery of new medicines. Epigenetics refers to heritable changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. In this proposal, the SGC at the University of Toronto will partner with Abbott, a pharmaceutical company, to create small drug-like molecules, or "chemical probes", that are potent, selective and active in cells. The compounds will be used to investigate the role of epigenetic mechanisms in Colon Cancer and potentially identify new drug targets using patient-derived cell lines. The research output from this project will be published jointly with Abbott, and related structural and epigenomic data will be placed in public databases. The chemical probes, antibodies and other reagents will also be made publicly available without restriction on use.