Structural Genomics Principal Investigators to receive more than $3 million from CIHR’s Fall 2023 Project Grant competition.

SGC's CIHR Award recipients. (L-R): Drs. Cheryl Arrowsmith, Matthieu Schapira, and Dalia Barsyte-Lovejoy.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has recently released the results of its Fall 2023 Project Grant funding competition. This competition aims to provide financial support to projects that will advance knowledge, research methodologies, patient care, and overall health outcomes.

In this funding cycle, three Principal Investigators from the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) have been awarded grants for their projects related to cancer epigenetics, the discovery of new chemical probes, and AI-assisted drug discovery.

We extend our warm congratulations to the successful Principal Investigators awarded by CIHR:

• Cheryl Arrowsmith with the project “Structural and Chemical Biology of Targeted Degraders of NSD2”. This research will focus on understanding the role of NSD2 in cancer cell survival and proliferation, intending to develop targeted protein degradation (TPD) drugs. Insights from this project could have a great impact on the TPD drug modality, potentially leading to novel treatments for a broad range of diseases.
• Matthieu Schapira will lead a collaborative project called "A Pan-Canadian Chemical Library to Explore Uncharted Chemistry Space for Drug Discovery". This project involves chemistry groups at universities across Canada, including Rob Batey, Fred West, and Tabitha Wood, as well as AI-driven screening groups including Jian Tang, Francesco Gentile, and Rachel Harding at SGC. Dr. Schapira will use computational techniques to create a virtual Canadian chemical library with billions of unique molecules. The goal of this project is to predict which molecules are bioactive for a given therapeutic protein target using state-of-the-art AI technologies. The team plans to synthesize the predicted molecules and experimentally confirm their bioactivities. This project aims to open academic chemistry to drug discovery and revolutionize the way chemical reactions are invented in universities across Canada.
• Dalia Barsyte-Lovejoy with the project “Targeting protein arginine methylation in the 9p21.3 loss tumor microenvironment”. She will investigate how protein arginine protein methyltransferase (PRMT) enzymes control the immune system myeloid cell function and tumor microenvironment. The goal is to determine how small molecule PRMT targeting drugs, which are currently undergoing clinical trials, can be effectively used. The research outcomes will help in developing better treatment options for cancer patients.

You can see the full announcement here.