NIH Awards UB-HWI's National Crystallization Center $5.5 Million to Advance Structural Biology
核心洞察
The National Institutes of Health has awarded the National Crystallization Center at the University at Buffalo a five-year, $5.5 million grant to continue advancing structural biology research.
The award builds on the center's initial 2021 NIH funding, which established the NCC at UB-HWI as an NIH National Resource serving a national user base.
Since 2021, the NCC has supported approximately 475 users from 238 academic research groups across 133 institutions in 34 states and four countries.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the National Crystallization Center (NCC) at the University at Buffalo a five-year, $5.5 million award to continue advancing pioneering research in structural biology. The new grant builds on the center's initial NIH award from 2021, which established the NCC at the Hauptman Woodward Medical Research Institute—now part of UB and called UB-HWI—as an NIH National Resource, a designation indicating that it provides a critical service to an extensive national user base of researchers at universities, research organizations, and industry.
"The University at Buffalo is a preeminent pioneer in medical research," said U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. "I'm excited that UB has earned a whopping $5.5 million in federal funding to continue cutting-edge structural biology research. This investment will ensure UB's research has continued access to state-of-the-art technology while translating lab research into real-life treatments for patients."
A National Resource for Structural Discovery
Since 2021, the NCC has worked with approximately 475 users from 238 different academic research groups from 133 different institutions. NCC users hail from 34 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and four countries, underscoring the center's role as a national hub for structural biology.
"The National Crystallization Center gives researchers across the country access to high-throughput crystallization and advanced imaging capabilities unavailable at most academic institutions," explained Marc Halterman, MD, PhD, senior associate dean and executive director of the Office of Research in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. "These technologies accelerate structural discovery, providing new insights into disease and opportunities for therapeutic development."
Notable Advances and Therapeutic Potential
Over the past five years, the NCC has contributed to several notable advances, including determining the structures of a possible treatment for nicotine addiction (搜索), inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 (搜索) virus, and possible inhibitors of a protein involved in making metastatic cancers drug-resistant. Congressman Tim Kennedy (NY-26) highlighted the breadth of this work, noting that "from infectious disease to cancer and addiction, this work happening in Buffalo has the potential to shape how we understand and treat the most pressing health challenges facing the world today."
Addressing a Key Bottleneck in Drug Discovery
Sarah E. J. Bowman, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry in the Jacobs School, serves as director of the NCC and principal investigator on the grant, a role she also held on the original award. Other key personnel include co-investigator Miranda L. Lynch, PhD, research assistant professor in the Department of Structural Biology, and Gabrielle R. Budziszewski, PhD, operations manager of the NCC at UB-HWI.
Bowman emphasized the centrality of structure determination to drug development. "Our goal with structural biology is to hypothesize about the function of a protein given its structure," she said. "How can we design a drug to change the function of disease-causing mutations in proteins? It all depends on having a really detailed idea of the protein's structure."
That process requires first crystallizing the protein, optimizing the crystals produced, and then sending the sample to a synchrotron, where the crystal is bombarded with high-powered X-rays to create a diffraction pattern. Computational methods then translate that pattern into a three-dimensional structure. "At the NCC, we are really focused on helping users with finding the best conditions to grow their crystals and then to help them with optimization," Bowman explained. "It turns out that finding which conditions will actually generate a crystal from your sample is one of the major bottlenecks in the process."
The NCC is well-equipped to address this bottleneck through its unique high-throughput crystallization screen, developed in the early 2000s with funding from the Protein Structure Initiative by researchers at HWI.
Expanding Capabilities and Training
The new grant will allow the NCC to maintain access to state-of-the-art instrumentation and unique high-throughput capabilities, expand optimization efforts to maximize crystal production, provide crystallization expertise and training, and develop new computational tools and resources. It will also enable UB-HWI investigators to host visiting scientists and fund additional workshops for users, which have become so popular that they are often overbooked.
The award also builds on Buffalo's century-long history in crystallography and structural science, including late UB faculty member Herbert Hauptman's 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. "This investment is a vote of confidence in Buffalo's role as a national leader in biomedical research," said Congressman Kennedy.