The Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) collaborates with academics, government labs, and pharmaceutical companies to develop unique chemical probes and drug leads that address unmet medical needs. Also, the SMDC is a core facility in the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and a Plug-in in UCSF CoLabs, an integrated set of campus core facilities.
As part of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the UCSF School of Pharmacy, we enable innovative technologies for small molecule discovery to further the UCSF mission of advancing health worldwide.
Why now?
Major research institutes, funding agencies, and the public are eager to see academic research lead to advances in human health. With less effort going into drug discovery research in the pharmaceutical industry, where will the next generation of drugs be developed? Every day, UCSF scientists work to understand disease and discover potential new therapeutic strategies. We have the opportunity to test these strategies with drug-like molecules, thus facilitating the translation of disease research into starting points for therapeutic development.
New chemical probes with therapeutic potential
The SMDC offers an appropriate mix of industrial and academic expertise needed to advance research programs focused on developing new chemical probes with therapeutic potential. We collaborate with academic labs and pharmaceutical companies to discover compounds that bind to target proteins in vitro or in cells, organoids, or animal model, and can be used to modulate protein and cellular functions.
Our research has four key aims
- Design probe molecules that can be used to characterize the functions of particular proteins or drive specific cellular phenotypes.
- Develop new protein-targeting technologies currently considered undruggable.
- Discover compounds that could be turned into drugs for diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
- Educate the next generation of drug hunters. Our tools and technologies include innovative and established methodologies to discover chemical starting points for drug discovery, including high-throughput screening, medicinal chemistry, high-content imaging, fragment-based discovery, and biophysical, biochemical, and cell biological characterization. We collaborate with investigators throughout academia and the private sector. Our scientists are also engaged in grant-funded research focused on important problems in chemical biology. More details: About Arkin Lab.
Why here?
The Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry is an ideal home for the SMDC. Department research focuses on exploring fundamental biological mechanisms and molecules of therapeutic relevance for better health, empowered by novel technologies at the interface of chemistry, physics, and computational sciences.
An intense focus on collaboration
The UCSF Mission Bay campus, located along the eastern edge of San Francisco, is the perfect location for the SMDC to execute its mission. It is home to several institutes for biomedical research, including the Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI), the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Gladstone Institutes.
The SMDC is an active participant in each of these aims. At least ten new companies have been incorporated based on work initiated with us, in addition to licensing technologies to several existing companies and maintaining collaborations with both new and established pharmaceutical partners. Scientists at the SMDC are actively engaged with drug discovery consortia, including the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (ADDC), the Chemical Biology Consortium (part of the NCI Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) program), Benioff Initiative for Prostate Cancer Research (BIPCR), and with pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, Genentech, Johnson & Johnson Precision Medicine, and Pfizer, through shared grants and sponsored research.