Structural Genomics Consortium and CHDI Foundation announce new partnership

"The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and CHDI Foundation have entered into a unique open-access research collaboration to discover and characterize new drug targets for Huntington's disease (HD) using structural and chemical biology In this first partnership of its kind, SGC and CHDI have explicitly agreed not to file for patents on any of the collaborative research and to make all reagents and knowledge available without restriction to the wider research community, including pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic research groups. The SGC is a public-private partnership accelerating discovery of new drugs through an open-access research approach, with particular focus on neglected areas of the human genome, creating an open collaborative network of scientists in hundreds of universities and in nine major pharmaceutical companies. The collaboration with CHDI—a not-for-profit drug development organization with a mission to rapidly develop drugs that will slow the progression of HD—further focuses this approach within a specific disease domain. As part of the collaboration, CHDI will support scientists at the SGC to generate research tools to solve protein structures of potential drug targets for HD ... The SGC will make any research tools developed freely available to the research community immediately and without restriction; working with a disease foundation will enable a targeted dissemination and rapid uptake of the developed research tools within the specific disease field ... Since no patent protection on the results of this collaboration will be sought, any investigator will have complete freedom to operate. As part of the collaboration CHDI will facilitate the dissemination of SGC's existing novel inhibitors of epigenetics pathways into its network of scientists and clinicians to uncover potential new therapeutic targets for HD ..."