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Why does SITraN need a new building?

SITraN has grown from an initial 64 staff and students in 2010 to having 300 dedicated researchers today with us today. The building is at capacity, and we are developing a new world-class sister building with the School of Medicine and Population Health to connect to the SITraN laboratories, double our capacity, expanding and upgrading our capabilities for translational neuroscience.

New facilities

• Drug screening facility
• Multiomics laboratory
• Supercomputing node
• State-of-the-art Microscopy and Electrophysiology Suite
• Advanced Therapy Laboratories
• Clinical Research Suite

Drug Screening

We have frequent approaches from pharma to screen libraries of compounds for neuroprotection in our validated disease models and assays.

Two hits to come out of our drug screening programmes are:

• Ursodeoxycholic acid, (UDCA), a repurposed drug for Parkinson’s now entering phase 3 clinical trials for neuroprotection in patients.
• M102, a novel compound for we received FDA & EMA Orphan Drug status and now poised to enter first-in-human trials for MND.

Expanding and automating our facility will further speed drug discovery and translation for patient benefit.

Multiomics facility

Our multiomics facility provides functional validation of promising compounds identified through our drug screening programmes. Multiomics technologies enable us to deeply study disease genetics and cell biology in order to discover new drug targets and develop new precision medicine approaches. New equipment to expand our multiomics capabilities in the new building will support drug discovery, validation, and biomarker development to facilitate clinical translation.

Supercomputing  

A super-computing satellite workstation, connected to the main university high-performance computing facility will enable our rapid use of machine-learning applications to analyse large multiomics research data-sets and enable in silico drug discovery to inform future drug discovery projects.

State of the art microscopy and electrophysiology suite This will equip the new laboratories to allow us to visualise neuronal injury mechanisms and their therapeutic amelioration more readily and over a longer time-course.

Advanced Therapy Laboratories

Space and facilities for research and development of gene and cell therapies will feed into the development of new advanced therapies at the Gene Therapy Innovation and Manufacturing Centre (GTIMC).

Clinical Research Suite

A clinical research participation suite for research with patients which does not require hospital facilities will complement our laboratory-based research capabilities.

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