HWI's Andrew M. Gulick, Ph.D. Awarded Two NIH Grants

The project will be funded by the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences within the NIH. The mission of the NIGMS is to study the fundamental biological processes that enable the understanding of the causes, prevention, and treatment of human disease.

The two-year grant supports the study on the way pathogenic bacteria produce small molecules that allow them to acquire iron, an element that plays important structural and functional roles in many proteins. Preventing bacteria from producing these molecules will allow an understanding of the role that iron uptake plays in the establishment and development of an infection. Gulick and Eric Drake, Sr. Research Associate, have developed a way to rapidly screen hundreds of thousands of chemicals for the ability to interrupt this bacterial process.

The award will allow Gulick's lab access to the NIH Molecular Libraries Program, a recent research initiative that aims to identify chemicals with new biological properties. Small chemical probes, including many potential drug-like molecules, are identified by screening large libraries of chemicals against a particular biochemical function. Realizing that the purchase and maintenance of such chemical libraries is beyond the means of academic research labs, the NIH developed a Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network (MLPCN) that provides public sector researchers with an opportunity to collaborate with NIH Centers to identify and characterize specific molecules that influence the functions of important proteins, biochemical pathways, and cells.

The Molecular Libraries Program is one component of the NIH Roadmap, an initiative that was launched in 2004 to support multi-disciplinary research and develop the tools needed to perform research that will allow the understanding of complex biological systems.