Each week, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy will highlight the bold work of researchers who have received funding from the Eshelman Institute for Innovation (EII). The Eshelman Institute for Innovation is made possible by a $100 million gift from Fred Eshelman to accelerate the creation and development of ideas leading to discoveries and transformative changes in education, research and health care. To learn more about the EII’s impact, visit unceii.org/impact.
Meet: Tim Willson
Project: The SCG-UNC: A Center for Open And Collaborative Target Discovery
Funded Amount: $1,999,996
About Project: The SGC-UNC promotes innovation through open sharing of research, material, and data. Greater than 80% of the enzymes known as protein kinases are understudied and their role in human biology is poorly understood. We aim to generate a functional map of these kinases to guide discovery of new medicines, through the creation and study of small molecules (called chemical probes) in a wide range of human diseases.
“The Eshelman Institute for Innovation was a critical partner in creating the first US Site of the Structural Genomics Consortium at UNC. A direct output of their finding has been the assembly and release to the scientific community of KCGS, the best publicly-available set of potent and selective kinase inhibitors.”