With a focus on research in the public interest, new sub-tenant is a great fit for OICR
Dr. Aled Edwards, President and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium.
(Photo courtesy Structural Genomics Consortium)
What does defining the three-dimensional structure of proteins have to do with improving the outlook for people diagnosed with disease?
At a recent event to celebrate the opening of new laboratory space in Toronto’s MaRS Centre, Dr. Aled Edwards, President and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), answered this question bluntly. “My mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. I looked at the treatments available and they’re the same ones we had 10 years ago – and they don’t work. If we’re going to make a serious impact with diseases like cancer, our current understanding isn’t going to be enough,” he said.
To acquire the basic knowledge needed to develop revolutionary treatments, Edwards and his colleagues at the SGC are trying a new approach. They are trying to engage a wide range of stakeholders with very different perspectives in an effort to identify and characterize the proteins that will have the most impact in medical research.
The SGC is composed of eleven member-organizations that have an interest in increasing the number of proteins that have been characterized. To join, members donate ₤3 million (C$5.7 million) in funding. This approach enables the consortium to pool funding from industry and public-sector groups in different countries. The SGC’s laboratories are located in at the University of Toronto, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and Oxford University.
The SGC’s unique strategy comes into play before scientists ever set foot in the laboratory. Like many scientists, Edwards and his colleagues are faced with tough choices about which scientific problems to prioritize.
Proteins are a vast range of biological molecules that play a role in many areas of biology – from giving the body structure to breaking down foods to transporting oxygen to the bloodstream. To date, the structures of only about seven per cent of human proteins have been determined.
Understanding more proteins would be very valuable to medical researchers, but the work is expensive and time-consuming. To decide which proteins should be prioritized, the SGC turns to its consortium members, which can nominate proteins to a target list.
Consortium members include groups that will be working with knowledge generated by the SGC and taking it to the next stage of the research process; they therefore have a good perspective on which protein structures will be most useful to medical researchers.
Consortium members also have representation on the SGC’s Board of Directors and Scientific Board, giving them a direct voice in the overall strategy and direction of the organization. And they also gain the right to place scientists in SGC’s laboratories to allow for direct collaboration and interaction between SGC scientists and scientists at member-institutes.
But one thing the consortium members are never granted is exclusive or early access to the consortium’s research results.
Edwards dislikes the idea of basic biological research being hidden or patented. "What society wants, and needs," says Dr. Aled Edwards, "is for all this information to be out there, free of charge, no patents, no restrictions. And that's what we do."
Instead, Edwards envisions a “pre-commercial” phase of research where basic scientific projects like protein characterization, genome sequencing, target identification and target validation are in the public domain. In this model the pharmaceutical industry is still able to use patents to protect the molecules that will become drugs, but nobody is allowed to own basic information about human biology.
The Consortium’s diverse membership attests to the strength of this idea. It includes public-sector organizations like Genome Canada, but it also includes some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, like Novartis and Merck. Even more significant than their financial contribution, Edwards says, is industry members’ willingness to have industry chemists working alongside the SGC’s researchers.
“When we first started the consortium, people told me ‘you’ll never get industry to invest in something where they don’t get exclusive access to the results.’ But they saw the value in our model and they have invested. Then people told me, ‘yes, but they’ll never share their chemists – their expertise is too valuable to loan out to a not-for-profit institute that exists for the benefit of humanity, but again they were wrong,” Edwards says.
“What matters in science and what matters to industry is results. And now that we’ve shown our model produces very good results, they’re enthusiastic to work with us.”
And there is good reason for industry to be excited. To date, SGC has consistently exceeded targets for the number of proteins characterized. Between July 2004 and June 2007, SGC deposited more than 450 protein structures in the open-access Protein Data Bank. The SGC’s work now accounts for 15 per cent of the human protein structures that have ever been defined.
By using new technology and innovative research methods they also brought down the average cost of defining a structure to $125,000, when it had previously cost up to $1 million. This will allow them to identify even more structures per year in the future, creating a snowball effect as their ongoing work allows them to refine their methods, making future work less difficult and allowing them to address larger challenges, such as creating specific chemical and protein ligands for each SGC protein.
Meanwhile, public-sector and industry research groups are already working to turn some of the SGC’s earlier work into treatments for disease. Each of the consortium’s three laboratories focuses on proteins related to a specific group of diseases. The Toronto group, led by Dr. Cheryl Arrowsmith, is focused primarily on cancer and diabetes.
In Toronto, the SGC is moving into new space at the MaRS Centre, which will put their group right in the middle of a large biomedical research cluster. At MaRS they will be a neighbour of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and be located close to the Institute’s chemists, genomics researchers and bioinformaticians – exactly the kind of people who benefit from the SGC’s basic research.
“What we do is one part of a much larger process, so we need to integrate with the downstream researchers or it’s not going to have the same impact it should have,” Edwards says. “We’ll be working alongside people who are really good at what they do, which is very exciting for us – and it makes sure we stay focused on our overall goal of finding better treatments for disease.”
