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Health and Medicine

Drug discovery center draws on UNC bench science

By putting UNC-Chapel Hill biologists and chemists in a place where they can work closely together, the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery is creating new treatments to solve some of health care's large challenges.

When Stephen Frye completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at Carolina in 1987, he set out to make a difference.

As a chemist concerned with hard-to-cure diseases, he spent 20 years at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), eventually working his way up to Worldwide Vice President of Discovery Medicinal Chemistry.

“When I finished up at Carolina, I felt that instead of going into academics, I’d go into the pharmaceutical industry because it’s always been important to me that I can see the impact of what I’m doing, that the things I do interface with the world,” said Frye.

Times changed, and so did the industry. Frye wondered if the future of drug discovery wasn’t in his chosen path in industry, but in the academic one he left behind. With collaborative basic science coming from every corner of campus, he felt that Carolina could be in the perfect position to make a big impact with translational medicine.

Carolina, it turns out, was interested in the same thing.

In 2007, the Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center brought Frye back to Carolina to create the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery.

The center was established to take the basic biological discoveries made by scientists who research different diseases and translate those findings into the small-molecule drugs that interact with cellular targets and improve outcomes for people.

At GSK, Frye avidly read basic science papers from academics and even worked with them from time to time. At Carolina, he works side-by-side with them.

This past spring, the center moved its operations into the brand-new Marsico Hall, a state-of-the-art research facility meant to make this kind of collaboration even easier.

“The main thing that I can do here at UNC that I could not do at GSK is to work on a day-to-day basis with physician scientists who see patients, who have an idea that they want to test for a way to treat that patient’s disease,” he said.

Locks and keys

Carolina’s biologists come to Frye with a lock – a biological state that, if it could be changed, would have a beneficial outcome for the patient.

The chemists – Frye and his researchers – look for the key: the small-molecule drug with the right properties to get into a cell and alter its function in a therapeutically beneficial way.

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