The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, the first component of a nationwide network that will produce innovative chemical tools for use in biological research and drug development, according to company release.

"Providing public-sector researchers with this unprecedented opportunity will broaden the scope of biological exploration," said NIH director Elias A. Zerhouni. "The NIH-supported chemical genomics network will have a transformative effect on medical research by expanding our understanding of how the human genome and proteome function, which in turn will speed the development of new ways to fight disease and improve human health," he added.

Up to 10 pilot centres will be funded at academic institutions and other locations across the country in FY 2005. "These chemical genomics centers will be coordinated to build a network in the academic research community for identifying a broad range of small molecules with promising properties for biological research," said NIMH director Thomas R. Insel.

To support the network, NIH plans to establish a repository to acquire, maintain and distribute a collection of up to 1 million chemical compounds. As was the case for the Human Genome Project, data generated by the chemical genomics network will be deposited in a central database, called
PubChem, which will be managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine and will be freely available to the entire scientific community.

"What we are doing is simply giving academic and government researchers a chance to contribute in a much more vigorous way to the earliest stages of the drug development pipeline: the identification of useful biological targets," said NHGRI director Francis S. Collins.

Christopher P. Austin, who is NHGRI's senior advisor for translational research, will direct the NIH Chemical Genomics Center. The centre, which will have a staff of about 50 scientists, plans to begin high-throughput screening of small molecules by the end of 2004.

The compounds, which scientists call 'small molecules' because they are smaller than proteins, can be used as tools to modulate gene function and improve understanding of biological pathways involved in human health and disease. This area of research is often referred to as chemical genomics.