ACRF Facility for Innovative Cancer Drug Discovery

ACRF Facility for Innovative Cancer Drug Discovery is awarded by Australia Cancer Research Funding (ACRF) for $2millions funding. This facility will enhance Australia’s cancer research capacity and provide Australian cancer researchers with ready access to powerful tools for early stage structure‐based compound discovery, to generate, so called, "hits". These hit molecules can then be further evaluated in the facility using cutting edge computational and fragment screening approaches and methods to measure the interaction between hits and their protein targets directly and rapidly. 

In addition, the facility will provide tools that enable Australian researchers to develop promising lead molecules and this will enable them to attract investment by the Pharmaceutical Industry and provide a “one‐stop shop” of early stage drug discovery tools, together with the more traditional high‐throughput chemical screening approach established by our collaborators at Walter Eliza Hall of MedicaI Research Institute, to Australian researchers required for the development of new therapies for a range of cancers that will improve patient outcome.

This facility will bring together research groups in the University of Melbourne Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, School of Chemistry, the Bio21 platforms, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Walter Eliza Hall of MedicaI Research Institute. The skill set brought to the facility is highly multi‐disciplinary with experts in medicinal chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, light and fluorescence microscopy, electron microscopy, crystallography, bioinformatics, engineering, protein chemistry, molecular biology, cancer cell biology and animal models of cancer.

If you're interested in accessing the ACRF funded instruments, please follow this link.