The NCATS Chemical Genomics Center is designed to bring advanced technologies and expertise to researchers who need specialized tools and support. Capabilities include high-throughput screens and follow-up medicinal chemistry efforts to identify and optimize small molecule probes of novel, unexplored cellular targets. These probes offer the research community proof-of-concept pharmacological tools that may serve as starting points for therapeutic development.
Results from probe projects are disseminated to the scientific community through the public PubChem database and via peer-reviewed publications. To date, NCATS researchers, in collaboration with hundreds of academic, nonprofit and private-sector scientists, have developed more than 60 probes that are freely available to the scientific community. Project descriptions are in the National Library of Medicine’s e-book Probe Reports from the NIH Molecular Libraries Program.