Southern Research Institute

Southern Research Institute is a not-for-profit institute that conducts basic and applied research sponsored by both commercial and non-commercial organizations in areas such as Drug Discovery, Drug Development and Engineering and Environmental Sciences.

History

Southern Research Institute has had a long-standing program in cancer drug discovery. The institute's scientists are credited with the discovery of seven currently used drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) including carmustine, lomustine, dacarbazine, fludarabine, amifostine, clofarabine and the latest pralatrexate (approved in 2009). Notable cancer researchers who worked at the institute include Howard Skipper,^[1] John Montgomery, Frank Schabel and Lee Bennett Jr.

Drug Discovery Research

Clofarabine^[2] is a nucleoside discovered at Southern Research Institute that eventually received FDA approval. Clofarabine, a second-generation nucleoside analogue received accelerated approval from the US FDA at the end of 2004 for the treatment of paediatric patients 1–21 years old with relapsed or refractory acute lymphoblastic leukaemia after at least two prior regimens. It is the first such drug to be approved for paediatric leukaemia in more than a decade, and the first to receive approval for paediatric use before adult use.^[2]

Pralatrexate is another anticancer drug whose discovery was a result of contributions from medicinal chemists at Southern Research Institute along with chemists from SRI International and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The US FDA announced the approval of pralatrexate in 2009 for the treatment of relapsed or refractory peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL).^[3] . Research on drugs of this class began at SRI International in the 1950s. Pralatrexate was first prepared there by Dr. Joseph DeGraw and Dr. William Colwell. Dr. Robert Piper at Southern Research Institute synthesized the key starting material (a bromomethyl compound) which was used to prepare the intermediates needed to make multigram quantities of high purity final compound. Multiple issued patents on this compound are jointly owned by Southern Research Institute, SRI International and Memorial Sloan Kettering and licensed to Allos Therapeutics.

Molecular Libraries Program

^[4] MLP was founded by the NIH to fund research aimed at identifying new chemical probes against biological targets that might be amenable for drug therapy. Southern Research Institute was one of eight extramural institutes selected for this initiative along with the Broad Institute, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Scripps Research Institute, Vanderbilt University, University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas.^[5] In addition the MLP initiative also included an NIH intramural site: the National Center for Chemical Genomics (NCGC).The Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network (MLSCN) is a national high-throughput biological screening resource that was launched on June 15, 2005. The goals of the MLSCN are to expand the availability and use of chemical probes to explore the function of genes, cells, and pathways in health and disease, and to provide annotated information on the biological activities of compounds contained in the central Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository in a public database (PubChem).The workhorse of the MLP program is its 350,000-strong library of unique chemical structures of the NIH’s Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository (MLSMR). The MLSMR is screened with biological assays or bioactivity experiments looking for particular areas of biological activity

Patents

• U.S. Patent 5,384,310
• U.S. Patent 5,661,136

References

External links

• Official website

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