Assay development and screening for discovery of chemical probes, drugs or immunomodulators
Funds the early end of drug discovery — building the assay, running the screen, and validating the hits into something worth chasing.
Every small-molecule drug starts as a hit in a screen, and every screen starts as an assay somebody had to build. The National Cancer Institute funds that whole opening stretch here, for chemical probes that illuminate the biology of a disease and for compounds that turn a target on or off as a step toward therapy or immunotherapy.
Four stages are in scope, and the notice describes each. Building…
Small-molecule discovery research: developing assays for specific biological targets and disease mechanisms, running high-throughput target-focused or moderate-throughput phenotypic and fragment-based screens, validating hits through orthogonal secondary assays and cheminformatics, and — per the notice's own fourth stage — hit-to-lead optimization work including SAR, ADME/PK/PD studies and in vivo efficacy testing.
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