Amgen, Sanofi, and Ono Pharmaceutical are founding industry members of the GPCR Consortium, a non-profit initiative that seeks to bring together major pharmaceutical companies and leading research institutes to advance research in G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) for drug development. The human body is controlled by 826 GPCRs, which are involved in a wide variety of human physiology and are implicated in many diseases. As a drug target, GPCRs are highly valuable but mechanistically poorly understood and with limited structural information that could aid in finding new drug candidates.

The research is currently planned to be conducted, but not limited to three leading academic sites: iHuman Institute at ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The GPCR Consortium hopes to attract up to five additional industry members to achieve the initiative's goal of determining structures of 200 of the 826 known human GPCRs, to be prioritized in disease areas that initially include diabetes, cancer, and mental disorders.

All research outputs, such as three-dimensional structures of GPCRs and constructs will be compiled and placed in the public domain. The consortium is data-centric, with the primary objective being dissemination of protein structural coordinates, reagents, and supporting data to both the consortium members and the broader scientific community.

Source: GPCR Consortium