The KU Drug Research Center was founded as a centralized facility and core staff, to help collaborators translate basic science into drug discovery programs and has embraced a two-fold strategy in creating an environment for the drug discovery and development:

• Collaboration through integrated activities across internal colleges, schools, centers and institutes, along with collaborations with other academic centers, government agencies and commercial partners. Many of the specific functions of the drug discovery and development process are distributed across the various centers and the School of Medicine, Colleges of Engineering and Natural Sciences, as well as the Law School and College of Administrative and Social Sciences.
• Innovation by developing and practicing new approaches and technologies to complement the ongoing discovery processes.

KU Drug Research Center will combine computational and experimental methods to elucidate, design, validate and apply new pharmacological concepts and strategies to the development and use of therapeutics and diagnostics. KU Drug Research Center will provide an integrated “systems” approach assisted by high-throughput screening techniques to elucidate drug mechanisms of action during discovery, target identification and in clinical trials. Such an endeavor will incorporate the ongoing research for the design and synthesis of novel, drug-like chemical scaffolds, and biologics to address the therapeutic needs. In addition, computational chemistry and molecular biophysics studies to predict and to define target proteins, druggable sites, potential binding affinities will be among the major activities of the center.

The KU Drug Research Center will accept collaborative projects in any therapeutic area where the collaborator has a significant interest and commitment to the program, while focusing internal efforts on cancer, stem cell research, neuroscience and emerging infectious diseases. There is a major commitment to the use of experimental disease models, as well as human-derived cell/engineered tissue models early in the discovery process.