The Nationwide Institutes of Well being has granted $2 million to researchers in UCI’s Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. The brand new Maximizing Investigators’ Analysis Award will fund drug discovery know-how growth within the laboratory of Brian Paegel, UCI professor of pharmaceutical sciences. “The NIH has generously supported my laboratory over time in response miniaturization and automatic, high-speed chemical evaluation,” Paegel mentioned. “The MIRA will enable us to discover high-risk approaches that circumvent the canonical guidelines of druggability. As an alternative of concentrating on mature proteins within the cell, the modus operandi of drug discovery, we’re engineering cutting-edge chemical and analytical instruments to search out molecules that management the method of protein synthesis itself.” Paegel’s collaborators embrace RNA chemical biologist Robert Spitale, one other UCI professor of pharmaceutical sciences; and ribosome structural biologist Jamie Cate, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry. The extremely interdisciplinary venture – involving instrumentation engineering, molecular and mobile biology, polymer chemistry, chemical synthesis and informatics – is the most recent instance of intensifying convergent science initiatives at UCI.
