Newswise — BOSTON—Boston University researchers Scott Schaus, associate professor of chemistry, and Lauren Brown, research assistant professor of chemistry, are among the inaugural winners in GlaxoSmithKlein’s (GSK) innovative “Discovery Fast Track” competition. Schaus and Brown, in collaboration with Jim McKerrow, professor of pathology at UCSF School of Medicine, were among eight academic scientists in North America chosen for a collaborative partnership with GSK focused on the discovery of new medicines.
The Discovery Fast Track competition is designed to translate academic research into starting points for new potential medicines. The eight winners in the first Discovery Fast Track competition were selected from among 142 entries across 17 therapeutic areas from 70 universities, academic research institutions, clinics and hospitals in the US and Canada.
The winning projects show clear opportunities to deal with important unmet medical needs, including antibiotics resistance, diseases of the developing world and certain cancer types.
Schaus and Brown proposed a novel approach for new treatments for leishmaniasis, a disease caused by protozoan parasites and transmitted by the bite of certain species of sand fly. The symptoms of leishmaniasis include skin sores, which erupt weeks to months after the person affected is bitten by sand flies. Other consequences, which can manifest anywhere from a few months to years after infection, include fever, damage to the spleen and liver, and anemia. More than 90 percent of the world's cases of visceral leishmaniasis are in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan, and Brazil.
The BU researchers will collaborate with GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) team, the sponsor of the competition, to rapidly screen and identify novel compounds to test their promising hypotheses. If advanced chemical testing is successful, the investigators could be offered a DPAc partnership to further refine molecules and assess their potential as novel new medicines. Work on the winning Discovery Fast Track projects will begin immediately, and the first screens are expected to be completed in mid-2014.
Launched in the U.K. in late 2010, the DPAc program is a new approach to drug discovery where academic partners become core members of drug-hunting teams. GSK and the academic partner share the risk and reward of innovation: GSK funds activities in the partner laboratories and provides in-kind resources to progress a program from an idea to a candidate medicine. DPAc’s reach is global. To date, GSK has initiated nine collaborations in nine disease areas in the UK, US and Canada.
About Boston University—Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized private research university with more than 30,000 students participating in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. As Boston University’s largest academic division, the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences is the heart of the BU experience with a global reach that enhances the University’s reputation for teaching and research. In 2012, BU joined the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada.
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