Zinc fingers as Pharmaceutical Scaffolds

Funding Activity

Website
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/211108

Funding Status
Closed

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Funded Activity Summary

Great advances have been made in pharmaceutical design and discovery over the last 50 years. While drugs have traditionally been discovered using random screening of natural product libraries and chemical databases, new technologies in protein chemistry, structural and molecular biology have been adopted in efforts to speed the drug design process and increase its hit rate. In addition, our rapidly increasing knowledge of the molecular causes of many diseases provides us with many opportunities to develop therapeutics directed towards known molecular targets. Nevertheless, despite these advances, problems such as drug resistance and toxic side effects that compromise drug efficacy make it clear that there is a need for new classes of drugs with different modes of action. Because of their favourable properties, small-molecule drugs comprise by far the largest class of currently available therapeutics. However, in many cases, a drug derived from a protein may be preferable. The development of protein-based drugs is a youthful and rapidly expanding area of biotechnology, but to date, most studies have focused on targeting pathological events that occur on the outside of cells. We propose to use a combination of methods from molecular and structural biology, together with recently developed high-throughput screening techniques, to develop a generic protein drug scaffold that can be used as a template to develop therapeutics against a wide range of inappropriate interactions that may occur between molecules within cells.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2002

End Date: 01-01-2004

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $482,640.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Oral and maxillofacial surgery

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

anti-cancer drug | biotechnology | drug design - protein-protein interaction | phage display | prion diseases | protein engineering | thalassaemia | viral diseases | zinc finger proteins

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