Drug Discovery Core (DDC)

MUSC Drug Discovery Core

The MUSC Drug Discovery Core (MUSC DDC) is a specialized resource providing tools, facilities, and expertise for early drug discovery and chemical biology. We employ virtual and physical screening, medicinal chemistry, chemical synthesis and chemoinformatics to study of the effects and properties of small molecules and proteins. As such, we are the only drug discovery resource in South Carolina with the ability to identify high-affinity ligands for a variety of biological targets.

Primary Goals of the MUSC DDC

  • To facilitate the discovery of new therapeutic agents and chemical probes with the focused vision of creating new chemical entities and optimizing their structures.
  • To provide chemical and medicinal chemistry support to synthesize hits identified by physical or virtual screening, and to optimize these hits through structure-based generation of analogues.
  • To assist investigators with the creation of new intellectual property, and to collaborate with the MUSC Foundation for Research and Development (FRD) to commercialize potential therapeutics.
  • To keep MUSC abreast of and competitive in the areas of academic drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, target engagement, and cheminformatics.

Beeson, C., Peterson, Y. K., Perron, N., Bandyopadhyay, M., Nasarre, C., Beeson, G., Comer, R. F., Lindsey, C. C., Schnellmann, R. G., & Rohrer, B. (2021). Newly Identified Chemicals Preserve Mitochondrial Capacity and Decelerate Loss of Photoreceptor Cells in Murine Retinal Degeneration Models. Journal of ocular pharmacology and therapeutics : the official journal of the Association for Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 37(6), 367–378. https://doi.org/10.1089/jop.2020.0140

Li, X., Jiang, Y., Peterson, Y. K., Xu, T., Himes, R. A., Luo, X., Yin, G., Inks, E. S., Dolloff, N., Halene, S., Chan, S. S. L., & Chou, C. J. (2020). Design of Hydrazide-Bearing HDACIs Based on Panobinostat and Their p53 and FLT3-ITD Dependency in Antileukemia Activity. Journal of medicinal chemistry, 63(10), 5501–5525. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.0c00442

Holshouser, S., Dunworth, M., Murray-Stewart, T., Peterson, Y. K., Burger, P., Kirkpatrick, J., Chen, H. H., Casero, R. A., Jr, & Woster, P. M. (2019). Dual inhibitors of LSD1 and spermine oxidase. MedChemComm, 10(5), 778–790. https://doi.org/10.1039/c8md00610e

Vose, A. D., Balma, J., Farnsworth, D., Anderson, K., Peterson, Y. K. (2019). PharML.Bind: Pharmacologic Machine Learning for Protein-Ligand Interactions. arXiv, 1911.06105. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06105

Kumarasinghe, I. R., & Woster, P. M. (2018). Cyclic peptide inhibitors of lysine-specific demethylase 1 with improved potency identified by alanine scanning mutagenesis. European journal of medicinal chemistry, 148, 210–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmech.2018.01.098

Peterson, Y. K., Nasarre, P., Bonilla, I. V., Hilliard, E., Samples, J., Morinelli, T. A., Hill, E. G., & Klauber-DeMore, N. (2017). Frizzled-5: a high affinity receptor for secreted frizzled-related protein-2 activation of nuclear factor of activated T-cells c3 signaling to promote angiogenesis. Angiogenesis, 20(4), 615–628. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10456-017-9574-5