WEHI-led project will widen access to screening technology
A WEHI-led project has secured $7 million in Australian Government funding to expand Australia’s drug discovery capacity and speed up work on new therapies.
The money comes from the Medical Research Future Fund. WEHI will add about $3.6 million in co-investment, taking the total investment to $10.6 million.
WEHI is delivering the project with the Bio21 Institute and Therapeutic Innovation Australia. Together, the organisations will expand the National Drug Discovery Centre, Australia’s premier small-molecule screening facility.
According to WEHI, the funding is meant to bridge a gap between early scientific discovery and new medicines. As a result, researchers around the country are set to gain wider access to specialised screening infrastructure.
National Drug Discovery Centre expansion
Identifying viable drug candidates is one of the most important steps in the drug discovery pipeline. Those compounds form the starting point for future treatments across diseases and conditions with unmet need.
However, Australian researchers often lack the specialised infrastructure needed to identify potential drug compounds efficiently. That bottleneck has made medicine development harder.
Under the project, researchers will get access to advanced high-throughput and virtual screening technologies. Those systems can rapidly search millions of drug candidates.
Chief investigator Professor Guillaume Lessene said, “Our researchers deserve better access to the advanced tech needed to turn their promising discoveries into future medicines.”
Lessene is a division lead and associate director of therapeutic discovery at WEHI. He said the project would strengthen Australia’s sovereign capability in drug discovery and help translate research into health outcomes.
Combined with the MRFF grant, the centre’s expansion is designed to strengthen national drug discovery infrastructure. It will also give more Australian researchers access to specialised services.
WEHI did not say how many projects would be supported, when the expanded access would begin, or where the extra screening capacity would be added first.
