Ontario government announces $15 million for Structural Genomics Consortium

The Ontario government is the first to step forward with renewed funding for the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) with announcements from other funding partners planned for later this spring. The provincial Budget allocated $15 million to the SGC, although documents say the funding is going to the Univ of Toronto and does not mention the organization by name.

The UK Wellcome Trust — the SGC's biggest contributor — has informally announced its intention to renew funding within the Consortium. In the first phase, it provided $44.7 million or nearly half of SGC's initial $95-million budget when the consortium was between Canada and the UK (R$, May 6/03). Sweden subsequently joined the consortium in 2004 via the Karolinska Institutet, boosting SGC's budget to $115 million.

It's anticipated that GlaxoSmithKline R&D, which provided $7.5 for the first phase, will be joined by two other pharmaceutical firms for the second four-year phase beginning July 1/07, boosting the total number of funders to eight.

The SGC was established in 2002 as an international venture between Canada and the UK with Sweden joining two years later. The latest Ontario funding renews the $15 million investment the province made in the SGC in 2003. At that time, the funding was flowed directly to the SGC via the Ontario R&D Challenge Fund, which in turn matched an investment by Genome Canada via the Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI).

"The $15 million is tremendous. The approach taken by SGC represents the new paradigm for how life sciences research is done today," says Dr Christian Burks, OGI's president and CEO, adding that the Ontario commitment is conditional upon the other partners renewing their funding. "This research is of great interest to specific gene families and human disease and big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies use protein structures as targets for new drugs."

It's anticipated that Genome Canada and CIHR will be among those renewing their SGC funding commitments. In last month's federal Budget, Genome Canada received $100 million in year-end funding to support its six regional genome centres, technology platforms and "ensuring that Canadian researchers can take the lead in large-scale international research collaborations".

As the largest ever Canada-led international research project and one of the largest throughput structural biology projects in the world, the SGC is already considered a major success. It has identified and deposited 375 protein structures into the Protein Data Bank ahead of schedule and at a cost of US$125,000 per structure. The SGC also conducts research into structural chemistry and membrane proteins, with the latter the focus of a pilot project. Each national node focuses on a specific area of research to leverage resident expertise and address areas of science considered priorities by their respective governments and research communities.

The SGC draws on a target list of 2,000 proteins associated with malaria, cancer, diabetes, inflammation and genetic diseases. The protein structures that the SGC deposits are freely available. It's estimated that they can reduce the time it takes to bring a drug to market by 18 months. The competitive advantage such a time reduction represents is attracting an increasing number of companies to explore the use of protein structures in their R&D and participate in the consortium.

"The Ontario government wants more industry involvement and I think they won't be disappointed on that front," says Burks. "This is a bold and exciting example of Ontario leading the charge."

The SGC is led by the Univ of Toronto's Dr Aled Edwards and each national node is managed by a chief scientist — Dr Cheryl Arrowsmith at the Univ of Toronto, Dr Michael Sundstrom at Oxford Univ and Dr Johan Weigelt at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

As chief executive, Edwards, is responsible for research implementation and reports to the SGC board of directors through its recently appointed chairman, Dr Wayne Hendrickson, a renowned expert in crystallography and a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia Univ in New York City. The SGC board sets strategic direction, milestones and administers the budget.

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