Planning Grant for BioMolecular Interaction Technology Center

制药和生物技术工业在维持和促进人口健康方面发挥着至关重要的作用，是美国经济的一个主要部门。这些行业已经从疾病的经验治疗发展到药物开发的复杂方法，这需要对生命过程的生物化学有更深入的了解。因此，对生物分子相互作用的准确描述已成为理解疾病机制的核心要素，现在是设计安全有效药物的基本要素。各种各样的仪器和方法被用来表征生物分子的相互作用。其中一组技术使用物理第一性原理进行分析。这些第一原理技术可以用来满足制药和生物技术行业比目前更多的需求。与此同时，学术界正在开发表征分子相互作用的原型仪器和方法。虽然其中一些开发已经商业化，但由于市场规模有限，其他开发仍停留在学术实验室的原型阶段。这些原型虽然适合解决学术问题，但没有针对工业用途进行优化，并且被安置在不能提供工业所需安全级别的实验室中。因此，形成了技术转让的障碍。美国国家科学基金会产学研合作中心的成立是克服这一障碍、推动分子相互作用科学领域发展的理想机制。

The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries play a vital role in maintaining and promoting a healthy population, and constitute a major sector of the US economy. These industries have evolved from the empirical treatment of disease to a sophisticated approach for drug development which requires a deeper understanding of the biochemistry of life processes. As a consequence, the accurate description of biomolecular interactions has become a central element in understanding disease mechanisms, and now is an essential ingredient for devising safe and effective pharmaceuticals. A variety of instruments and methods are used to characterize biomolecular interactions. One group of these technologies, used physical first principles for their analysis. These first principle techniques could be used to address a great many needs in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries than they currently do. Meanwhile, the development of prototype instruments and methods for characterizing molecular interactions is being pursued in the academic world.While some of these developments have been commercialized, others, mostly due to their limited market size, have remained prototypes in academic laboratories. These prototypes, while suitable for addressing academic questions, are not optimized for industrial uses, and are housed in laboratories that do not provide the level of security required by industry. Consequently, a barrier to technology transfer has developed. The formation of an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center is an ideal mechanism for overcoming this barrier and advancing the field of molecular interaction science.