Core Facilities

Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD)

The CIDD was established as a joint venture between University of Texas Health San Antonio (UTHSA) and University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 2012.

There are currently three cores:

In addition, the CIDD works closely with the Target Identification Facility (TIF) at the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute, the Structural Biology Core Facilities at UTHS, and the Preclinical Pharmacological Core at UTSA. Together the core facilities provide the requisite infrastructure to assist investigators at UTHSA and UTSA to carry out interdisciplinary drug discovery research in target identification and validation, assay development, structure-based and computer-aided drug discovery (including virtual screening and de novo design), high-throughput screening, and hit and lead discovery and optimization.

Our Goal

The overreaching goal of CIDD is to support the advancement of drug discovery research and education at UTHSA and UTSA to facilitate the translation of basic discoveries into novel therapeutics that alleviate pain and suffering, improve quality of life of patients, and save lives.

The center accomplishes the goal by:

1. Bolstering multidisciplinary collaborations among investigators in the fields of structure biology, computer-aided drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology.
2. Providing cutting-edge scientific facilities and equipment.

The CIDD has the capability of target identification & validation, assay development, virtual & high-throughput screening, and optimization of hits/leads aided by computational modeling, structural biology and medicinal chemistry in close collaboration with the Biomolecular NMR, X-ray Crystallography, Cryo-Electron Microscopy and Protein Structure Biology Cores at the UTHSA.

Below is a brief description of the facilities and resources at the CIDD: