Planning Grant for BioMolecular Interaction Technology Center

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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.