Princeton Research Center for Drug Development aims at creating a high-end R&D platform for biomedical research. The Center will focus on the research of innovative drugs, promoting academia-industry collaboration while accelerating the translation of new core technology. It will serve as an important role for industrial contribution and the nurturing of spin-off biotech pharmas, in pursuit of creating an robust and innovative ecosystem specially in the bio-pharmaceutical sector. The Center carries out the mission of adapting new models for global collaboration to incrementally strengthen its capacity in delivering sci-tech innovation and translation, and to realize the potential of becoming an sci-tech innovation hub that committed to biomedical discovery in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
Research Areas
We plan to establish two R&D platforms for discovery in new drugs at the initial stage:
1. Biological Activity Research Platform: this platform aims to study the structure and function of the targeted protein and related target genes through the specific interaction between small molecular compound probes and target protein, while at the same time identifying and confirming the targets and the pilot compounds of new drugs.
2. Pharmaceutical Chemistry Research Platform: this platform will comprise 2 sub-platforms, namely the small molecular pharmaceutical chemistry platform and the polypeptide research platform.
We also plan to set up a Computational Chemistry Platform to develop efficient conformational search algorithms based on quantum mechanical calculations; study the effects of chemical modification on the conformation and binding capacity of polypeptides and proteins; establish a computer-aided drug R&D system; develop efficient methods to accurately estimate the impact of different improvements in lead compounds on affinity.
