UA College of Pharmacy researchers at the UA’s BIO5 Oro Valley facility are working to quicken the process of drug-discovery evaluation
Medicinal chemists face a multitude of hurdles trying to discover new and effective therapeutics for the treatment of disease.
In the University of Arizona’s BIO5 Oro Valley facility is a team of College of Pharmacy researchers attempting to address these “speed bumps” along the path from bench to bedside by utilizing new automated technologies and fast chemical methods to increase the rate at which new hypotheses in drug discovery can be effectively evaluated.
“We have the personnel, process flow and infrastructure to work in a high-throughput modality producing libraries (i.e., collections) of potential drugs,” said Christopher Hulme, professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at the College of Pharmacy and co-director of the BIO5 Oro Valley drug discovery facility.
Hulme compared this to a historical precedent in the auto industry: “People used to make cars one at a time. Henry Ford then invented the assembly line, enabling tremendous productivity gains in product output. That’s somewhat analogous to what we’re doing. Used at the right time, assembly line high-throughput approaches can be tremendously enabling.”
Read more at UANews: http://uanews.org/story/oro-valley-team-uses-technology-to-speed-drug-discovery