From SBS' President
Name change for SBS
Is now the time?
By Dejan Bojanic
"What's in a name" was the subject of Bob Campbell's soap
box article in the February edition of SBS News. As you may have now gathered,
there is significant discussion about whether SBS should change its name to
better reflect its evolving role in the world of drug discovery.
Why is a name so important? There are several reasons. Firstly, our name should
be descriptive and accurately portray the mission of the society. A name has
a strong effect on perceptions, and if you want a simple illustration of this,
just look at mine; it may describe my genetic origins in eastern Europe, but
who would guess that I'm British! The Society for Biomolecular Sciences
was a spot on descriptor for our early years, having been created by a group
that wanted to establish high-throughput screening as a discipline within the
drug-discovery process. Today however, we play a wider role by helping to advance
the science of drug discovery, and our name should reflect more accurately
this expanded function.
Secondly, a name (or its acronym) helps to set up a
brand identity. The SBS brand is a strong one, having established its credibility
with annual conferences
and a respected scientific journal. How often have you been asked "are
you going to the SBS conference this year?" or heard about microtiter
plates being produced to "ANSI/SBS standards"? Our acronym easily
rolls off the tongue, and we should be aware of the importance of this. Any
changes could hurt the brand or at least set it back for a while.
As I wrote
in my previous article, we have morphed into a drug-discovery society. Although
HTS is still a valuable drug-discovery tool, we are now operating
with higher bandwidth and are much more involved both upstream and downstream
of this technology. Moreover, we see our educational role increasing, and our
responsibility expanding to cover all areas of drug discovery, not just the
screening segment.
We have a lot to consider. SBS has a strong following, and
mention of a name change will no doubt arouse passion in some and indifference
in others. A key
consideration is that we want the outcome to be a win-win situation, where
we can evolve and embrace a wider audience without alienating the very people
who put SBS on the map in the first place.
It is you, our members, who will
decide whether we keep our existing name or change to a new moniker. We clearly
need to look to the future and adapt to
the changing needs of our business. Since the inception of SBS, there have
been many scientific discoveries, and new technologies have emerged that
are having wide impact on drug discovery. Notable examples, to name a few,
include
RNAi, the Human Genome Project, Lipinski Rule of 5, and the role of HERG
in QT prolongation. Looking forward, the focus may still be on small molecules,
with a vast universe of 1060 drug-like structures to explore, but there are
also therapeutic protein and gene-modifying approaches in the offing that
may
open up new avenues for the treatment of diseases.
Our society needs to be in
the midst of such new discoveries to facilitate their introduction and disseminate
new learning. The greatest asset of our
society is that we are an interdisciplinary community of scientists, engineers,
informaticians, and vendors who work together in businesses dedicated to improving
humankind's quality of life. Our name should reflect this noble cause
and you, our members, will make the choice that befits.
Editors Note: For more
on the SBS name, see the Letters section.
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SBS/NIH connection
NIH Roadmap Molecular Libraries Initiative:
New Opportunities for SBS Members
By Marilynn Larkin
The NIH Roadmap (http://nihroadmap. nih.gov), a massive undertaking by the National
Institutes of Health that began with a series of meetings initiated in 2002 by
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, has now taken on form and meaning for the
biomedical research community. Of particular interest to SBS members are the
Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiatives now underway (see NIH Roadmap
and Molecular Libraries Roadmap in Brief on p. 5). These initiatives will offer
the academic and non-profit sectors unprecedented access to the latest assay
and screening technologies, and will also provide opportunities for industry.
Because of the importance and evolving nature of these new initiatives, SBS
has made a commitment to NIH to help communicate information about RFAs, funding
opportunities, new databases, and other resources for the chemical genomics
and drug-discovery communities. Information will be available on an ongoing
basis in these pages, in a new section of the SBS web site, in SBS e-wires,
and in other SBS publications.
New Paradigm
The Molecular Libraries Initiative "is a new paradigm that offers enormous
opportunities to the academic and non-profit sectors, but will also require
them to learn an entirely new field of science," Co-Director Chris Austin,
MD, told SBS News. "We'll be making available screening tools, technologies,
and databases on the kind of industrial scale that, until now, has existed
only in pharma or biotech."
Austin stressed that the initiative is "completely new"-not a consolidation
of existing NIH projects. "One of the requirements for all the Roadmap
initiatives is that the projects could not or would not be done by any single
institute. With respect to screening, the Molecular Libraries Initiative has
learned an enormous amount from the longstanding screening program at the National
Cancer Institute, and the more recently developed program at the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and will actively coordinate with those
programs. At the same time, the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network
(MLSCN) is a much larger set of initiatives, and is not focused on a particular
disease or developing drugs, but rather chemical probes of biological function."
It's this "newness" that has been part of the challenge, Austin
continued. "It's so new that people didn't initially understand what our
goals were. They thought that NIH had decided to develop drugs. But small molecules
are agnostic as to their application. They can be used as drugs or as research
tools. For us, it's the latter." Public sector centers are being set up
to screen not only conventional targets, "but to really focus on the hard
areas that have been difficult so far, such as the 'nondruggable genome', protein-protein
interactions, high-throughput yeast assays, and high-content screening. These
are things that pharma has been interested in, but they're not robust enough
yet to be broadly utilized."
The public sector can take on such "risky" endeavors, he said, "because
we don't have the need to develop a commercially viable drug in a short period
of time, the way pharma does." At the same time, the MLSCN is not exclusive
to the academic community, he emphasized. "Anyone can submit an assay.
So this is a resource for anyone who is interested in developing probes for
some uncharacterized target area."
95% of the Genome
In essence, the MLSCN will take existing tools and technologies that are used
mainly to scour the druggable genome and use them to get into the 95% of
the genome that is not currently being mined, said Austin. "We will
do that by developing novel assay formats, novel screening formats, and novel
chemical diversity," so that there is relatively little overlap with
the work going on in industry. "The way to think about it is that we
are using some of the same tools as are used in industry, but to different
ends - by analogy, like two carpenters might use the same tools to build,
for example, a house in one case and a chair in another. We are fortunate
to have a lot of the hardware-e.g., assay formats, liquid handlers, readers,
informatics - that have been developed because of the demands of industry.
We have been able to take those tools and adapt them to our own purposes,
and have gotten wonderful advice from a great many people in industry in
so doing."
A new database, PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), will be the repository
for new compound information, serving as a kind of "Genbank for small
molecules." PubChem will connect information on small molecules gleaned
from the Molecular Libraries Initiative with gene information and protein information
in the medical and biological literature-again, something NIH has never done
before. "All this presents challenges," acknowledged Austin, "but
it's also very exciting."
Information for this article was provided in interviews with the following
NIH officials: Chris Austin, MD, Director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center
(NCGC) and co-Principal Leader, Molecular Libraries and Imaging Implementation
Group; Linda Brady, PhD, Project Team Leader, Molecular Libraries Screening
Centers Network and co-Principal Leader, Molecular Libraries and Imaging Implementation
Group; Doug Auld, PhD, NCGC Group Leader, Genomic Assay Technologies; Yong
Yao, PhD, Scientific Review Administrator, Division of Extramural Activities;
Ingrid Li, PhD, Coordinator, Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network;
and Jamie Driscoll, Project Officer, Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository.
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Advancing The Science of Drug Discovery
In This Issue:
