 |
| Medical Biotechnology |
|
 |
Fueled by global society’s ever increasing demands for safer, more effective drugs, and for certain diseases, any treatment at all, pharmaceutical companies and increasingly, medical biotechnology firms, find themselves under more pressure than ever to produce new therapies of all kinds. After the discovery phase, the two major factors that determine if and when these expectations can be fulfilled are the time it takes to move a putative “drug” from the research bench to the patient, and the overall cost of so doing. Both of these factors have increased significantly over the last 35 years, thus putting at risk the entire process of drug development.
In collaboration with its TriBioMed partners [Prosetta and the NYS CoE in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences] and in its own laboratories CUBRC is undertaking the exploitation of two revolutionary new biological concepts discovered by Prosetta scientists. These novel paradigms are based on two notions; a) that protein folding is far more heterogeneous than previously recognized and many alternatively folded forms (or conformers) are not mis-folded but have functions in their own right – the new science of Bioconformatics and b) that Viral Capsid Assembly is not, as has previously been thought, a classical example of a spontaneous intra-cellular self-assembly system but an active process, proceeding through a defined intermediate stages, requiring energy as well as host proteins as molecular facilitators.
Bioconformatics will afford us the opportunity of targeting therapy more precisely in order to a) avoid the side-effects of drugs, b) to identify individual vulnerabilities and c) ultimately, to tailor drugs to the individual or ‘related genetic group’.
The rationale underpinning our TriBioMed concept is that it allows exploitation of the wide-ranging applications of bioconformatics across the entire spectrum of medicine and biological science in a much shorter time-frame and at lower cost than is the case with traditional business models.
In particular the discovery of the true nature of the mechanism of viral capsid formation opens up not only the possibility of developing a whole new generation of anti-viral drugs but to be able to do so, for the most part, in non-biocontainment laboratories and therefore at much lower cost and at far greater speed that achievable hitherto.
Based on these scientific breakthroughs we are undertaking a wide variety of R&D projects spanning infectious, neuro-psychiatric, metabolic and oncologic diseases.
|
 |
 |