New consortium to look at proteins

Published: 1-May-2003


The Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKline and four of Canada's leading research funding agencies have set up a £40m (€58m) partnership with the aim of unravelling the structure of more than 350 human proteins. The goal of the newly formed Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is to encourage the development of new and improved drugs and other healthcare products; it is the only public-private partnership worldwide to undertake such a targeted programme of research.

The three-year initiative has been established as a charity, and the consortium will operate from research laboratories at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, and collaborate with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge. The SGC will utilise the vast resource of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which is nearing completion, and will move on to the next significant challenge: to explore the structure and function of proteins encoded by these genes.

The protein targets that will be studied will include proteins associated with cancer, neurological disorders and malaria. Information gleaned from the project will provide an insight into the proteins' functions, their role in safeguarding health or increasing susceptibility to disease and their potential as therapeutic targets for new medicines. The consortium will aim to produce the first protein structures by the end of 2003; all structures will be released freely into the public domain.

The project initiators, Wellcome Trust and GSK, will contribute £18m (€26m) and £3m (€4.4m) respectively to the consortium. The Canadian members are Genome Canada , the Ontario government's Challenge Fund, the Ontario Innovation Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health who are collectively contributing £19m (€28m).

Professor Aled Edwards, chief executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, said: 'I am excited by the opportunity to provide protein structures for the global research community.' The consortium is currently recruiting staff and is expected to be operational early in 2004.

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