Boston University’s chemistry department has won a $10.7 million Centers of Excellence grant, the largest the department has ever received.
The grant is from the National Institutes of Health to help BU establish a state-of-the-art chemical library.
The new library, the Center for Chemical Methodologies and Library Development, will make BU a hub in the field of chemical research and in the biomedical community.
John A. Porco Jr., assistant professor of chemistry and pharmacology, will serve as director of the center.
Chemical libraries, Porco explained, facilitate the development and use of new methodologies, which lead to the synthesis of drugs and other useful chemicals.
“These libraries serve as a collection of chemical entities,” Porco said, explaining the development of new methods to create chemical reactions allows existing libraries to expand.
“Developing new methods helps chemists make more complex compounds,” he said.
Two objectives of the library include preparations to develop new chemical building blocks for new libraries and also prepare a master library based on smaller collections, Porco said.
“It will be a mixing and matching of smaller libraries to make a more complex one,” Porco said.
Fifteen universities submitted applications to the Centers of Excellence Grant Committee, and based on their favorable critique, the committee passed along its recommendations to the NIH. Only BU and the University of Pittsburgh received the grant.
James Panek and John Snyder, professors of chemistry, and Scott Schaus, assistant professor of chemistry collaborated their research and development for the proposal with Porco and will serve as key investigators of the center.
“We spent six months developing the grant [proposal] as a group,” Schaus said.
According to Schaus, each contributed unique knowledge to the proposal, due to their specialties in different areas of synthetic chemistry.
“What made it a great proposal was that it was new and interesting ideas about chemistry,” Schaus said.
Schaus said one important aspect of the new center is its accessibility. He said many of the methods that will be used have been corporately applied, but have not been available to the public due to patents.
“The center’s website will have procedures searchable and downloadable,” Schaus said.
While the BU community has access to the library’s resources, Schaus said pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers worldwide would also have the use of the center’s methods and techniques.