The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), an Anglo-Canadian charitable consortium of public and private agencies including Oxford University, announced recently that it has delivered its first 50 human and malaria protein structures into the public domain on budget and two months ahead of schedule.
The new data that this provides to research will expedite the development of medicines and provide tools for researchers to study important diseases.
The human proteins whose structures were placed into the public domain include drug development targets across a range of diseases such as cancer, inflammation, osteoporosis and diabetes. The SGC protein structures represent a spectrum of human drug targets that includes protein kinases, protein phosphatases, proteases and enzymes involved in steroid metabolism.
Professor Aled Edwards, the SGC’s Chief Executive, said: ‘The progress we have made over the past 10 months is a testament to the commitment and skill of our scientists. I am looking forward to the next year, in which we are aiming to make public the structures of an additional 100 proteins that are both of high scientific impact and directly linked to human disease.’