Chaguturu to lead drug discovery at high throughput screening lab
Rathnam Chaguturu
"He's coming with vast experience in drug discovery," said Barbara Timmermann, University Distinguished Professor and chair of medicinal chemistry. "This position needs leadership and direction. Dr. Chaguturu will build and manage the high throughput screening facility and assay development efforts. He'll help us to discover new drugs."
Working in collaboration with the KU Cancer Center, Chaguturu's guidance of the lab will boost KU's drug discovery efforts for cancer and better position the center to attain the National Cancer Institute's Comprehensive Cancer Center designation.
"We'll be relying on Dr. Chaguturu to play a leadership role by helping drug project teams define drug discovery strategies," said Scott Weir, director of the Office of Therapeutics, Discovery and Development at the cancer center. "He'll run HTS as a business, a core lab to support researchers with drug targets moving into discovery. The HTS lab will also support startup pharmaceutical companies in the region. It will foster not only human health projects at KU but animal health as well."
In the late 1980s, Chaguturu aided design and development of the groundbreaking Zymark robot to run enzyme assays, a facet of high throughput screening technology.
Before coming to KU, Chaguturu was director of drug discovery for Sierra Sciences, a biotech research firm based in Reno, Nev. Before that, he was the senior principal scientist for high throughput screening and assay development at FMC Corp. in Princeton, N.J. In addition, Chaguturu has worked as a project leader for Dow Chemical and as an assistant professor in the biochemistry department at Princeton University.
"I'm incredibly excited to join KU and the Jayhawk community come August," said Chaguturu. "I share the vision of Drs. Scott Weir, Roy Jensen and Barbara Timmermann to make KU the best in the business of cancer drug discovery."
High throughput screening relies on quantitative biology, chemistry, automation, high content imaging and bioinformatics to detect out of hundreds of thousands of compounds those few that are active against drug targets. These active compounds, called chemical hits, then are studied further to pinpoint the best drug candidates for development.
While high throughput screening labs are typical at pharmaceutical companies, few universities have those capabilities.
"Because of the cost of the equipment and the chemical library, a majority of academic institutions can neither afford nor facilitate high throughput screening for the biological targets pursued by their faculty," said Chaguturu.
The high throughput screening lab at KU is a key resource in drug discovery that is utilized by cross-campus research initiatives such as the cancer center. The lab is financed by the Center for Cancer Experimental Therapeutics, established by a National Institutes of Health Center of Biomedical Research Excellence grant.
Additionally, the cancer center funds the laboratory and is budgeted to invest heavily in this function over the next 10 years.
"I'd like to make the HTS lab at KU second to none by hiring top talent and by equipping it with state-of-the-art instrumentation," said Chaguturu. "We'll offer KU's HTS lab as a cost-effective way for academic researchers to screen their targets. I'd also like to open doors for small biotechs."
Increased investments in staff, equipment, information management systems and expansion of the chemical library are planned as part of the life science development plans of KU and the surrounding region.
The lab will eventually be situated in the $20 million Phase III building of the Structural Biology Center on KU's west campus in Lawrence. Now under construction, the facility is slated for a March opening.
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