New Zealand's new drug discovery centre honours pioneer

The Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, a research organisation aimed at developing new drugs for serious disease, has been launched in New Zealand.

The Maurice Wilkins Centre brings together over 200 researchers from multidisciplinary teams to create a worldclass infrastructure for drug discovery and development, covering aspects such as biological modelling, structural biology, molecular biology and medicinal chemistry.

The centre is named after pioneering New Zealand physicist Maurice Wilkins, who along with Francis Crick and James Watson was awarded a Nobel Prize for Medicine for work confirming the double helix structure of DNA.

The facility has been developed from the Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, one of the seven Centres of Research Excellence established by the New Zealand government. It has eight principal investigators, led by Director Professor Ted Baker, and is based at The University of Auckland.

As well as research collaborations with institutions across New Zealand, biopharmaceutical companies Neuren, Proacta and Protemix are working with the centre on the development of their product pipelines. The Wilkins Centre has also played a role in stimulating the move of biotechnology tools company Symansis from the UK to New Zealand. It is now working with the company to develop new products that go on sale worldwide in September.

"The launch of the new centre encompasses our vision for the future, to build on the work done over the past three years to become a world-leading institution in research into understanding the cause of diseases and developing drugs to treat them," said professor Baker. "Our research is world-class; our teams have a number of drugs in clinical trials, many of which are licensed and being developed by large global companies, and we have a number of companies that have been started based on our discoveries."