Drug Discovery and Development

The mission of the BIO5 Oro Valley (BIO5 OV) Drug Discovery and Development Center is to expedite the discovery of new therapeutics and medicines to treat key un-met medical needs. To achieve this aim, we employ an academic-industrial philosophy where the Center has aligned enabling technological innovations in chemistry and biology and coupled them with leading scientists who have significant industrial translational experience that spans therapeutic areas such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson’s disease, and asthma, to name a few. Representing a unique innovation cell, BIO5 OV has successfully merged key academic responsibilities of teaching and training future generations of scientists with the significant goal of creating advanced therapeutics for the patient in need and local economic development.

Ongoing collaborations span several disease states with organizations in the academic, not-for-profit, and private sectors. Indeed, building relationships and drug discovery consortiums with scientists from all three of these classifications of research enterprises is pivotal to our operations and future success. Platforms for early stage drug discovery that enable the identification of drug-like molecular starting points include significant virtual screening capabilities driven by a dedicated Computer-Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) group and the state’s largest archived and data-based collection of small molecules (>100,000) for target discovery and validation. The ability to rapidly produce drug-like molecules is enhanced with (a) state-of-the-art chemical technologies that reduce cycle times for small molecule production and (b) an excellent analytical group that provides high-throughput purification, compound isolation, and other analytical functions.

The Center has "Call for Targets" and "Call for Compounds" initiatives in place to both identify new potential collaborators with biological targets and harvest compounds from local laboratories. In the "Call for Compounds" initiative, potential lead-like or drug-like molecules will be collected, reformatted, bar-coded, checked for purity, and navigated through the NIH submission process to the Molecular Library Small Molecule Repository (MLSMR). In doing so, the submitted compounds will be evaluated against hundreds of macromolecular targets implicated in disease pathogenesis and data deposited in the public domain, creating and enabling new translational opportunities for the scientific community at large. BIO5 OV views these exercises as part of the HARVEST movement within the local biomedical research environment (Harnessing Arizona Research Value to Expedite Scientific Translation). In a reverse sense, after review through our "Call for Targets" paradigm, compounds or probes will be made available to investigators to help shepherd their projects along the path to translational readiness.

BIO5 Oro Valley has a robust platform to enable "drug hunters" to discover new therapeutic candidates. We welcome potential partners to participate in both of the HARVEST initiatives. Indeed, our doors are always open to you. For individual or group tours of the facility, please contact Dr. David Bishop.