About the CIDD
The Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD) is a joint venture between UT Health San Antonio and University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and co-directed by Dr. Daohong Zhou and Dr. Stanton McHardy. It provides a diverse array of core facilities and expertise to facilitate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into pre-clinical drug candidates that can be further developed into therapeutics for human diseases.
Our Mission
The mission of the CIDD is to support the advancement of drug discovery research and education at UTHSA and UTSA with the ultimate goal of translating discoveries from basic research into innovative therapeutics that alleviate pain and suffering, improve quality of life of patients and save lives.
The center will accomplish this mission by bolstering multidisciplinary collaboration among investigators, creating infrastructure support, enhancing trainee development, and assisting in the recruitment of new faculty members in the fields of aging and cancer biology, structural biology, computer-aided drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology. The work done in the CIDD will focus on target identification & validation, assay development, virtual & high-throughput screening, and optimization of hits/leads aided by artificial intelligence-based drug discovery and medicinal chemistry. Our primary aim is to develop a unique drug discovery platform and generate a robust pipeline of drug candidates for IND enabling and IND filing in age-related diseases, pediatric and adult cancers, and other areas.
