Recipients of SULSA Chemistry Catalyst Fund Announced

SULSA has awarded £200K of funding for medicinal chemistry projects in Scotland. 

Twelve collaborative projects in SULSA Universities were awarded £200K funding through the Chemistry Catalyst fund.

The Chemistry Catalyst fund is a pump-priming fund that aims to provide grants of up to £20,000 to cover proof of concept medicinal chemistry projects. By pump priming this kind of research, SULSA wants to fill the funding gap between hits from a screen into validated leads, which are highly attractive to potential commercial partners and can more easily qualify for further funding or licensing deals. 

It follows from SULSA’s very successful High Throughput Screening fund, which has already awarded around £500K to novel screening strategies, and demonstrates SULSA’s commitment to drug discovery. 

Professor Ruth Ross, SULSA’s Translational Biology theme Director commented: “This fund will really accelerate the hit to lead process in SULSA Universities by de-risking early hits from the screening process and delivering validated drug candidates that can be more confidently be taken into clinical trails.” 

The fund has be used for the initial optimisation of hits or fragments from screening projects where additional chemistry SAR will strengthen a follow-on grant application, Medicinal Chemistry projects where a limited specific synthetic chemistry programme could justifiably generate preliminary results for a grant application, or for Drug Metabolism and pharmacokinetic analysis to aid translational grant applications. 

SULSA’s Director Professor Andrew Hopkins said: “We are very excited about this novel fund that really bridges a gap in the drug discovery process for the academics in our Universities. We anticipate that by funding small scale projects that cover the many different stages of the early drug discovery process we can de-risk early drug candidates such that they can be more attractive as clinical candidates for the pharmaceutical industry. SULSA identified this gap, and through a collaborative effort committed the funds to making it happen.” 

A large part of the SULSA funded drug discovery projects have been carried out at in SULSA funded cutting edge core facilities including the Dundee University’s Drug Discovery Unit (DDU), Strathclyde University’s Drug Discovery Portal (DDP), Glasgow University’s Scottish Bio-screening Facility or Aberdeen University’s Scottish Biologics Facility (SBF) and Marine Bio-discovery Centre. 

For more information on SULSA's Drug Discovery facilities, click here.

The first call was open to all principal investigators in SULSA Institutions and received 18 high calibre applications of which 12 were funded that are listed below:

Iain Gilbert (School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee)  £20,000. “A novel scaffold for a novel profile: Dual 5HT1A/D4 antagonists.” Work will be carried out in the DDU at the University of Dundee with the collaboration of the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program at the University of North Carolina.

Angus Lamond (School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee) - £13,557. “Developing a structure activity relationship for novel splicing modulators." Work will be carried out at the DDU at the University of Dundee.

Nick Westwood (St Andrews School of Chemistry, University of St Andrews) - £18,100. “Exploration of a new inhibitor binding site on bacterial sialidases: Novel Inhibitors of relevance to community-acquired pneumonia” Work will be carried out at the Biomedical Sciences Research Complex at the University of St Andrews.

Mateo Zanda (School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Aberdeen) - £13,500. “Development of stable tumour-targeting peptide vectors.” Work will be carried out at the Institute of Medical sciences, University of Aberdeen.

Craig Jamieson (Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry, University of Strathclyde) - £19,403. “Design, Synthesis and Evaluation of PAR-2 Receptor Antagonists.” Work will be carried out at the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde.

Paul Wyatt (School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee) - £18,897. “The hit validation and structure guided optimisation of O-GlcNAcase (OGA) fragment inhibitors as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease”. Work will be carried out at the DDU at the University of Dundee.

Simon Mackay (Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences) - £20,000. “Neuroprotective compounds acting as antagonists at A2a receptors.” Work will be carried out at the Strathclyde Innovations in Drug Research (SIDR) at the University of Strathclyde.

Ruth Ross (School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Aberdeen) - £15,040. “Peripherally-restricted CB1 allosteric inhibitors for the treatment of type-2 diabetes” Work will be carried out at the DDU at the University of Dundee and the Kosterlitz Centre for Therapeutics at the University of Aberdeen.

Arduino Mangoni (School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Aberdeen) - £13,500. “Development of novel DDAH inhibitors or the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.” Work will be carried out at the Kosterlitz Centre for Therapeutics at the University of Aberdeen.

Manfred Auer (School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh) - £17,000. ‘Design and production of a tagged one-bead one-compound library (TOBOC Library) of purines as privileged scaffolds for inhibition of many enzyme classes (kinases, ATPases, GTPases, Polymerases) and receptors (GPCRS)”. Work will be carried out at the Centre for Systems Biology Edinburgh at the University of Edinburgh.

Irwin McLean (School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee) - £14,989. "Optimisation of small molecule, up-regulators of filaggrin, for the treatment of atopic dermatitis”. Work will be carried out at the DDU at the University of Dundee.

Julian Blow (School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee) - £15,861. "Synthesis of G2-M cell cycle inhibitors for tumour cell line profiling”. Work will be carried out at the DDU at the University of Dundee.