Laufer Center Researchers awarded Biomedical Sciences Innovation Funds from SBU

Laufer Center researchers, Markus Seeliger, Ivet Bahar, Robert Rizzo, and Iwao Ojima has been awarded Biomedical Sciences Innovation Funds from SBU.

This funding aims to integrate innovative structural biology techniques with computational biology and medicinal chemistry to develop drug lead compounds at a significantly faster rate than is currently possible. Thanks to the recent SBU-BNL seed award, we have established LI-XRA at SBU/BNL, a high-throughput workflow that allows for the determination of the structure of hundreds of proteins bound to target proteins. The purpose of this proposal is to analyze and interpret extensive amounts of data and predict the most promising combinations of fragments for drug development. Moreover, SBU-DD will offer the necessary infrastructure to test the binding of fragments identified in LI-XRA. LI-XRA is the only facility of its kind in the US and would be an invaluable resource for researchers in both academia and industry. This new initiative represents the next logical progression that capitalizes on SBU's expertise in computational biology at the Laufer Center. The collaboration between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratories would synergize the advanced technologies in X-ray physics available at BNL with the computational and chemical expertise of scientists at SBU, paving the way to a large-scale collaborative research grant submission.