Consortium aims to combine computing and biology to speed cancer drug discovery.

Hungarian drug discovery services company TargetEx www.targetex.com (formerly known as RecomGenex) has taken over coordinating the final phase of the European Cancer Research Consortium. TargetEx says that the former project coordinator, AMRI Hungary, decided to resign from this role due to in-house reorganization. The project’s scientific steering committee subsequently nominated TargetEx to take over the reins.

The three-year CancerGrid project involves 10 European SMEs and was initiated in 2007 with €2.8 million, or about $4.13 million, from the European Commission under its FP6 program. The consortium was established to develop and refine methods for the enrichment of molecular libraries to facilitate the discovery of potential anticancer agents.

The project aims to combine novel computer technologies and biology to develop focused libraries with a high content of anticancer leads, build models for predicting disease-related cytotoxicity and enzyme inhibition or receptor antagonism using HTS results, and develop a computer system based on grid technology that will accelerate and automate the in silico design of libraries for drug discovery processes.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to develop novel anticancer lead candidates together with a novel applicable research model that could cut the expenses and shorten the timeline of anticancer drug discovery,” says Gyorgy Dorman, Ph.D., head of medicinal chemistry at TargetEx and scientific coordinator of CancerGrid.

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