Dr. Tudor Oprea, chief of the Division of Translational Informatics in the Department of Internal Medicine at UNM’s School of Medicine, said the award is a part of the NIH Common Fund initiative called Illuminating the Druggable Genome.
“Our aim is to try and make sense of all this information and put it together in an organized fashion in order to establish new relationships between medicines, drugs and drug targets,” he said.
He said that NIH is interested in identifying ways to shed light on the unknown parts of the human genome in order to develop new treatments for diseases like cancer.
In the pilot phase of the project, researchers will establish background information on these unexplored genes and create a publicly shared database so scientists can find out what they can accomplish with limited time and resources, Oprea said.
“Ideally you want the drug to be safe and not to touch many other destinations and to be effective,” he said. “We want drugs to be safe and effective and want to discover tools that would allow us to accelerate drug discovery toward that goal.”
According to a press release from the NIH, there are an estimated 3,000 genes in the DNA of humans that could be targeted by drugs in order to manipulate their expression. Only 10 percent of these “druggable genes” are currently the targets of approved drugs.
Oprea said the investigation will be carried out by a group of professors from around the world. He will be joined by Cancer Center researchers Larry Sklar and Anton Simeonov.
Researchers from a division of NIH called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the European Bioinformatics Institute in England, and the Center for Research in Denmark are also partners in the project, he said
Dr. James Anderson, a director for the NIH common fund, said the project could speed up the process of drug development.
“By focusing on understudied genes, we hope to find potential targets for medications to treat or cure some of our most burdensome diseases, and then share what we learn so that all can build on this knowledge,” he said.
The NIH Common Fund has run this particular grant through the National Cancer Institute, but Oprea said they are interested in finding treatments for all sorts of diseases.
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Oprea said he hopes that within two years they will have a user interface portal, hosted by the NIH, that will provide scientists and the public at large with open-ended information on drugs and their targets.
“This is a team work. Many people are collaborating in this project and this is an international effort,” he said. “Diseases, just like scientists, have no borders.”
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or Twitter @mianfawadshah.
