Structural Genomics Consortium

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2004 to determine the three dimensional structures of proteins of medical relevance, and place them in the Protein Data Bank without restriction on use. The SGC operates out of the Universities of Oxford and Toronto. Over the past five years, the SGC has accounted for ~25% of the global output of novel human protein structures each year, and ~40% of the annual global output of structures of proteins from human parasites. The SGC target proteins have relevance to human health and disease, such as diabetes, cancer and infectious diseases such as malaria. The SGC is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust, GSK, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Takeda, Abbott, Life Technologies, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Genome Canada, the Ontario's Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation (MEDI). Recently, these organizations together have committed more than US$65 million to the consortium to sustain operation from 2011 to 2015.

The SGC is also spearheading an "open access" chemistry partnership – a new model for pre-competitive drug discovery in which the public and private sectors collaborate to generate potent and selective pharmacological inhibitors of human proteins that regulate epigenetic signalling, and commit to make these reagents available without restriction on use.

In 2011, the SGC launched a project to create high-quality recombinant antibodies to proteins implicated in epigenetic events in an effort to stimulate research on these proteins. The project is carried out in partnership with leading academic research groups in the field (Tony Kossiakoff and Shohei Koide at University of Chicago, Sachdev Sidhu at the University of Toronto) and the laboratory of Jack Greenblatt at the University of Toronto. These reagents will be made available without restriction on use.

The SGC is headed by Aled Edwards (CEO/Director). Operations at each site are managed by a Chief Scientist – Cheryl Arrowsmith in Toronto, Canada and Chas Bountra in Oxford, UK.