Shamrock Structures Awarded Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Grant To Develop Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) For Drug Discovery

CHICAGO–Shamrock Structures, LLC, a privately held structural biology company, announced today that it was awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) for Drug Discovery. The grant is being funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and is being conducted in collaboration with scientists at Argonne National Laboratory’s Biosciences Division.

The process of lead drug discovery presents an early and significant bottleneck in the process of pharmaceutical drug design and slows the ultimate development of new therapeutic treatments. The goal of this project is to develop the use of WAXS as a routine screening tool for detection of functional interactions between proteins of therapeutic interest and small molecule ligands for the purposes of drug discovery.

“We are fortunate to have teamed with outstanding scientists at Argonne to commercially develop a new technique to speed the drug discovery process,” said Richard L. Walter, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Co-principal Investigator of the grant. “The WAXS technique holds promise as a high impact drug discovery tool that we can commercialize to our pharmaceutical industry customers.”

“WAXS constitutes a new and powerful tool to impact the lead discovery process. The technique is target-general, meaning that a single, standard protocol for the collection of WAXS data can be applied to virtually any protein,” said Lee Makowski, Ph.D., WAXS Team Leader at Argonne’s Biosciences Division and Co-Principal Investigator of the grant.

“This SBIR grant helps us expand our collaborative research with our colleagues at Argonne as we envisioned when we established a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with them in 2007,” said Steven J. Schiltz, Chief Executive Officer. “Our company’s close proximity to Argonne and its Biosciences team assures excellent coordination of our collaborative work under this grant award.”

The award, entitled “Wide Angle X-ray Scattering for Commercial Applications in Drug Lead Discovery” is being directed toward the hardware, software and experimental design development of WAXS to render the technique more automated and amenable to commercial use by pharmaceutical industry researchers. The use of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne during this project will enable the Principal Investigators under this grant to maximize productivity and development of the WAXS technique. The APS at Argonne stands out as the premier hard X-ray research facility in the Western Hemisphere.

Shamrock Structures, LLC, (www.shamrockstructures.com) is a privately held, structural biology, protein crystallography and synchrotron beamline services company that determines the three dimensional structures of proteins and protein complexes. The Company offers integrated gene-to-structure services and efficient access to X-ray synchrotron data collection, enabling pharmaceutical clients to decrease the time required to advance from protein targets to novel drug development.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.