VCU Center for Drug Discovery

Welcome to the VCU Center for Drug Discovery. Our mission to pursue the discovery and development of therapeutics, technologies and targets (TTTs) remain the same. That will directly improve human health through the application of fundamental knowledge gained in the areas of medicinal chemistry, structural biology, pharmacology, biochemistry, pharmaceutics, engineering, and others. The Center has developed several key core facilities including chemical syntheses, computational chemistry and drug design, structural biology, biological screening, and protein production. With these in place, the Center is now expanding to several new core facilities including pharmacokinetics, formation and nanotechnology, and proteomics. Our ultimate goal is to complete our drug design, discovery and development platform with later stage drug development components such as metabolism, toxicology, drug delivery, pharmaceutical engineering and formulation, and clinical trials within VCU.

This expansion of boundaries will catapult a knowledge-based enterprise to an outcomes-based enterprise. Within the first few years of the realignment of its goals, the Center has already developed key relationships with pharma/biotech sector in helping move some of its TTTs towards the clinic. In the following pages, you will find more detailed information on the TTTs being developed for thrombosis, cancer, sickle cell anemia, infections (bacterial, viral, etc), opioid use disorders, Alzheimer’s disease and other debilitating conditions. We welcome researchers at VCU interested in any perspectives of drug discovery and development to join us in our collaborative ventures and using our facilities. We welcome pharma/biotech sector interested in our intellectual property or in having a discussion on the future of science. We welcome one and all! Please feel free to reach out to any of us or visit us in person.