The Brazilian Agency for Industrial Research and Innovation
EMBRAPII is a Social Organization funded by Brazilian Federal Government through the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations (MCTI), the Ministry of Education (MEC) and the Ministry of Health.
EMBRAPII supports public/private partnerships through non-refundable grants for the development of projects at industry and academy laboratories. Funds are available exclusively for innovation projects.
The CQMED as EMBRAPII unit
CQMED has been accredited as an EMBRAPII Unit for Innovation in drug discovery in partnership with Brazilian pharmaceutical companies. The projects focus in the development chemical probes that target proteins associated with cancer and infectious diseases. Our lab works together with pharmaceutical companies in drug development and medicinal chemistry projects. These projects are part of the precompetitive stage of the drug development process with the goal to develop synthetic molecules that target a disease-related biological target protein. CQMED excels in solving protein structures with ligand molecules and change molecules to gain high affinity and selectivity. Thus, to accelerate the development of new drugs, we have a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the following areas: molecular biology, protein production of interest, structural biology, medicinal chemistry, biochemical assays, and cell assays.
In general, our projects comprise the following workflow:
- Selection of target proteins with biological importance
- High-throughput cloning for the functional region of the protein
- Small-scale protein expression tests to identify the suitable expression conditions
- Production of recombinant protein on a large scale
- Confirmation of protein identity by mass spectrometry
- Screening for identification of hits
- Co-crystallization target protein + hits
- Potency test to evaluate the affinity of hits to proteins
- Synthesis of new series of molecules to optimize the hit molecule
- Co-crystallization target protein + optimized hits
- Potency test of optimized hit
- Selectivity test of optimized Hits
- Cellular assay and cytotoxicity assays