Intervention: Diagnostics, Therapeutics & Vaccines
The Challenge:
Advances in genomic and proteomic technologies continue to dramatically impact drug discovery and the development of therapeutics. The challenge we face is to accelerate the rate of discovery and the transition to application, intervention, and impact.
Areas of emphasis in the University of Georgia Center for Drug Discovery include chemotherapeutic control of parasitic infections, drug synthesis methodologies, structure-directed anti-virals, and RNAi-based disease intervention.
Researchers in the Poultry Diagnostics and Research Center, the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, the Center for Food Safety, the Georgia Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratories, the Institute of Bioinformatics, and the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases pursue both traditional serology- and PCR-based diagnostic technologies as well as new platforms that apply advances in nanotechnology. The University of Georgia, in partnership with Emory University, is also home to an NIH-funded Influenza Center for Excellence in Influenza Pathogenesis and Immunology.
A centerpiece of infectious disease research at the University of Georgia is the Animal Health Research Center, a 75,000-sq ft facility with ABSL-3 / BSL-3-Ag high-containment capacity for basic and applied research on vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases of humans and animals. Vaccine development continues to be an expanding area of emphasis, particularly in the College of Veterinary Medicine, in partnership with such units as the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, a world-class leader in the study of carbohydrate science, including biomedical glycoscience as it applies to vaccine development.