Integrated multidisciplinary platform for accelerated and innovative therapeutic discovery – TheraFast

About the project

Therafast focuses on speeding up and streamlining the pre-clinical stage of drug discovery, by building state-of-the-art technology platforms for the two major components of modern pharmacology: immune therapies and small molecules.

Aside from platforms implementation and optimization, we also propose: A) to use the platforms to perform innovative screens, to discover therapeutic leads for several medically-relevant targets, but currently unaddressed; and B) to develop novel technologies for generating and screening small molecule libraries. Towards these goals, we propose to accomplish the following aims:

To establish a screening platform for discovering novel human monoclonal antibodies and T cell receptors (TCR).
To implement small molecule discovery using DNA-encoded libraries (DELs).
To discover and validate antibody/TCR and small molecule therapeutic leads.

Work Packages

WP1. Building and screening of antibodies and T cell receptors;
WP2. Building and screening of DNA-encoded libraries;
WP3. Discover and validate leads;
WP4. Knowledge community: dissemination & training;
WP5. Project management.

Partners

University of Bucharest (CO-UB)
Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (P1-UBB)
Institute of Biochemistry of the Romanian Academy (P2-IBAR)
C.D. Nenițescu Institute of Organic and Supramolecular Chemistry (P3-ICOS)
Timiș County Emergency Clinical Hospital, Centre for Gene and Cellular Therapies in Cancer Treatment (P4-OncoGen)