Good to Know

Center for Innovative Drug Discovery

Dr. Stanton McHardy (center) and members of the Center for Innovative Drug Discovery

UTSA’s Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD) is a joint venture between UTSA and UT Health San Antonio. The center is composed of two facilities: a High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Facility located at UT Health San Antonio and a Medicinal Chemistry and Synthesis Core Facility at UTSA.

Led by director and co-founder Dr. Stanton McHardy, the CIDD provides diverse core facilities and expertise with the goal of facilitating the translation of basic scientific discoveries into tangible preclinical candidate drugs that can be further developed into clinical therapies for human disease.

Researchers in the CIDD work collaboratively with investigators from around Texas and the nation to develop small-molecule therapies for disease areas such as cancer, non-opioid pain management, diabetes and infectious diseases, including COVID-19. In the CIDD’s medicinal chemistry lab, researchers design small molecules to optimize biological activity and develop efficient synthesis routes to prepare the molecules to support structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies. The multidisciplinary programs the CIDD is involved with provide CIDD staff and UTSA chemistry students the opportunity to interact with collaborators from areas such as molecular biology, pharmacology, structural biology and biochemistry.

The CIDD was established with generous support from the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund, including endowments for CIDD cofounders Dr. Doug Frantz and McHardy, as well as startup support from the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute and a UT Library, Equipment, Repair and Rehabilitation (LERR) grant. The CIDD is now supported by multiple state and federal extramural funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).

In addition to its academic partners, the CIDD collaborates with multiple pharmaceutical industry partners providing contractual research support for drug discovery programs. Since 2012, the CIDD and McHardy have secured over $15 million in extramural funding and contract research funding, with over $6 million coming directly to the CIDD. The CIDD is also actively engaged with the San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics, supporting collaborations between UTSA, UT Health San Antonio, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Texas BioMed.

“The CIDD not only collaborates with other institutions but also does contract work with companies and private clients in the USA,” said Dr. Karinel Nieves-Merced, a researcher with the CIDD. “Our chemical portfolio includes the design and synthesis of complex natural products, sugars, steroids, amino acids, and PROTACs, Proteolysis Targeting Chimera.”

The CIDD’s long-term strategic growth plan includes developing new areas of drug discovery research and providing additional training and education opportunities for UTSA students. Recently, the trustees of the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund awarded the College of Sciences and Frantz $883,000 to establish the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker CIDD Preclinical Pharmacology Core for Accelerated Drug Discovery. Housed within the CIDD, the core’s cutting-edge, latestage preclinical pharmacology and translational drug development capabilities will synergize with existing CIDD capabilities and help researchers launch new therapies for cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases and other conditions.

UTSA students in the CIDD and McHardy labs have a unique opportunity to engage in collaborative research in an industrial-type setting, along with state-of-the-art instrumentation and technologies, which provides an incredible training platform for the next generation of drug discovery scientists.

“The research setting in the CIDD and associated technologies, training and resources are unmatched in Texas,” McHardy said. “UTSA students are uniquely positioned to learn industry-level medicinal chemistry concepts. The momentum and excitement in this area at both UTSA and UT Health San Antonio is now fueling the development of a new crossdisciplinary graduate-level degree program in drug discovery.”