PITE-FAPESP

PITE FAPESP 13/50724-5

Despite an increased investment in pharmaceutical research by industry and public funders, the productivity of drug development and the introduction of truly novel drugs have been in steady decline. The high failure rate at a late stage in clinical development is mostly due to limited understanding of the biology of the drug target and the disease. The impact of failures is compounded by the tendency of pharmaceutical research to focus on a small number of drug targets, leaving the majority of potential targets under-investigated and under-utilized.

The PITE-FAPESP was the public-private grant which established the SGC Chemical Biology Center at UNICAMP in 2015 (SGC-UNICAMP). Within the PITE grant our aim is to develop and provide chemical probes to the under-studied portion of the human kinome. This area was chosen because there is a vast expertise in developing kinase inhibitors, but most approved drugs and current drug development programs target a small subset (<10%) of kinases, mostly in oncology.

This project aims to deliver 8 chemical probes in collaboration with the other SGC centers and requires the combination of expertise from diverse areas, including medicinal chemistry, protein biochemistry, assay technology, crystallography and cell biology, as well as a network of external collaborators in clinical and other areas.