Research lead
Scientists at Oxford University have developed a low-cost method of optimising drug hits and validated the technique by identifying a small molecule they say could pave the way to a new class of drugs for treating Type II diabetes.
The method will enable small academic labs to search large databases of drugs. Lead researcher, Grant Churchill, said, “Our method […] begins with the natural chemical but rather than modifying it with a time-consuming and expensive chemical syntheses conducted by a team of chemists, [we] use computers to identify corresponding small molecules. We have linked the computational methods commonly used by pharmaceutical companies to a freely available database of 5 million existing compounds – the ZINC database.”
The team, which was financed by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, has tested the method by successfully identifying a small molecule called Ned-19, which is involved in insulin secretion.
Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive said, “This discovery about insulin secretion shows how important it is to have centrally held data repositories that are free to access.”
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