New NSERC investment in research at York University could help speed up drug development
Research project could lead to a faster way to get approved drugs on the market
TORONTO, May 3, 2019 – A grant of more than $900,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) will fund a new research project led by Professor Sergey Krylov, York Research Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry, and Professor Ryan Hili, both based in the Faculty of Science at York University.
The researchers hope to design new ways to automate key processes of pre-clinical, early-stage drug development, facilitating faster routes to clinical testing, making treatments for illness available sooner.
Developing small-molecule drugs from original idea to the launch of a finished product is a complex endeavour which takes an average of ten years to reach the open market. The early stages of drug development are slow, expensive, and prone to failures, and they can take up to half of the total time required for drug development. The new NSERC grant supports research that aims to transform early stages of drug development into a fast and robust operation.
Professors Krylov and Hili are working on the development of new technologies that, if successful, will facilitate automating key processes that make up early stages of drug development. Automating these processes will provide more efficient and faster routes through the risky initial stages and enable faster entry into the later testing stages.
Obtaining a single approved drug requires thousands of validated hits during the testing stages. A validated hit is when chemical compounds have confirmed binding to a therapeutic target, typically a protein. The anticipated technologies will facilitate fast and reliable delivery of a large number of validated hits for downstream testing stages.
Based on five processes supporting algorithmization and robust controls, the research into the new technologies has the potential to lead to an integrated and automated identification of validated hits.
The project will be carried out by an interdisciplinary academic team, led by Krylov and Hili at York, in collaboration with two pharmaceutical companies, Alphora Research and GSK Canada and an instrumentation-development company, SCIEX.
The project is also expected to generate new knowledge in related areas of research and industry-demanded skills. The developed technologies will be commercialized via licensing to the supporting organizations and other companies.
QUOTES:
I want to thank the federal government for supporting this project. NSERC’s grant will allow us to develop new technologies that reduce the time it takes to develop new drugs. Automated identification of validated hits, that we aim at, will save pharmaceutical companies time and money and lead to faster development of more affordable drugs.” – Professor Sergey Krylov, York University
York University champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. York students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. York U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, York is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni. York U’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.
Media Contact:
Yanni Dagonas, Media Relations, York University, 647-468-7850, yannidag@yorku.ca
