The University of California contains an enviable collection of shared resources that – taken together – can support drug discovery from start to finish. The goal of UC Core is to make finding these facilities easy. The list of resources was curated and annotated by hand and the information is up to date. It is our hope that this compendium will leverage system wide synergies and accelerate the discovery of novel medicines for patients in California and world wide.

To use, locate on the start page in the top menu in which part of the drug discovery pipeline you are currently located and select the sub task at hand. UC Core will then bring up resources that can help with the execution of these tasks from all five campuses.

UC Core is a task-centric compendium of drug discovery resources across UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCSD and UCSF.
The outline of UC Core is based on the industrial model of drug discovery: At the beginning, a disease modifying target is located. In a next step, large small molecule libraries are screened for compounds that modulate either the target or the disease phenotype in the desired manner – so called hits. Hit compounds are then optimized through medicinal chemistry and characterized in cellular and in vivo models and further optimized until they are so called leads. At this point leads can enter the pre-clinical development phase that studies these compounds under FDA compliant conditions. The final stage is the document preparation, FDA filing for a new navigational drug (IND) and clinical trials phase I through III.

We would love to hear from you with any feedback or suggestions on how to further improve this resource via our contact page.