Boehringer Ingelheim joins SGC for further research into incurable diseases

German family-owned drug major Boehringer Ingelheim has joined the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which intends to promote research into protein structures and epigenetics that could pave the way for the development of novel therapies for previously incurable diseases.

As a member of the SGC, Boehringer Ingelheim will help fund precompetitive drug research aimed at bringing new, more effective medicines to patients faster. The SGC is based at the Universities of Toronto, Canada, and Oxford, England.  No financial terms of the collaboration have been revealed.

The SGC and Boehringer Ingelheim will work together on different research projects aimed at identifying small molecules that can enhance or inhibit the activity of proteins involved in epigenetic control. The study of epigenetics addresses heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence. Alterations in these processes are linked to many common diseases such as cancer, diabetes, inflammation, obesity and several psychiatric diseases. The discovery of new chemical probes is hoped to contribute to dramatic increases in our understanding of these processes and some of these probes may also provide starting points for drug discovery.