Broad Institute awarded grant to develop chemical probes for human biology and disease

The development of small molecule probes is an intensive effort that involves more than high-throughput screening of molecular libraries. Before screens can be carried out, months of meticulous work are needed to lay the necessary scientific groundwork. Will chemicals be tested in test tubes or cells? How will the biological effects of small molecules be measured? At the Broad Institute, many of these questions can be addressed by leveraging the power of large-scale approaches such as global gene expression-based screening and high-content cellular imaging.

Once the preliminary work is complete and a screen begins, Broad researchers ensure that all of the data are captured digitally and deposited in public databases. The ICCB and the

Broad Institute pioneered this type of public data sharing through their creation of ChemBank, and more recently researchers at the Broad have been contributing to a second public database, PubChem, which is associated with the Molecular Libraries and Imaging Initiative. Follow-up work, including further biological testing and small-molecule optimization, is then required to develop promising small molecules into bona fide molecular probes of human biology. This requires modern organic synthesis, a scientific endeavor that is an underpinning of the Broad Institute.

"The Molecular Libraries Program has cultivated an extremely high-quality collection of small molecules that are wonderfully complementary to the unique collection established at the Broad Institute," said Schreiber. "We are eager to begin exploring the biomedical potential of these chemical compounds, in addition to our own, and to share our results with the global scientific community."

About the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT was founded in 2003 to bring the power of genome-based knowledge to medicine. It pursues this mission by empowering creative scientists to construct new and robust tools for genomic medicine, to apply them to the understanding and treatment of disease, and to make them freely accessible to the global scientific community.

The Institute's scientific community is comprised of faculty, professional staff, and students from throughout the MIT and Harvard, and is jointly governed by the two universities.

Organized around scientific programs and platforms, the unique structure of the Broad Institute enables scientists to collaborate on transformative projects across many scientific and medical disciplines.

For further information about the Broad Institute, go to http://www.broad.mit.edu.