Scottish Structural Proteomics Facility, University of St Andrews, UK

A £6-million (US$11-million) lab dedicated to finding treatments for ‘superbug’ infections — those resistant to conventional antibiotics — opened at the University of St Andrews in Scotland in December.

The Scottish Structural Proteomics Facility (SSPF) is a collaboration between the universities of Dundee and St Andrews. It is designed to streamline the process of drug design, from the identification of novel therapeutic targets for drug-resistant bacteria to producing candidate drug leads.

The centre emerged from the realization that Britain had fallen behind Japan and the United States in this research field, says its co-director James Naismith, professor of chemical biology at the University of St Andrews. It is intended to close a gap in both skills and technology.

Essentially a structural-proteomics facility dedicated to drug discovery, the SSPF will house industrial-scale equipment for crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, with an emphasis on expressing difficult-to-produce membrane proteins. It will also have large-scale robotic equipment with cloning and expression technology.

Naismith says that this technology will make it easier for him to recruit international talent. Already there are signs that the SSPF is helping to close the skills gap, as it has attracted scientists from Japan and the United States. “We are now recruiting for other principal investigators,” Naismith says.

Researchers will collect the findings on a database of enzymes to share with colleagues around Britain. They are especially interested in viral entry to cells and replication.

The centre was initiated with a development grant from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, and established with £600,000 from the two universities and £4.2 million from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.