Merck joins SGC, contributes $7.5 million

Merck & Co Inc is contributing $7.5 million to the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) as its newest corporate member. Merck's decision to join the SGC was prompted by the organization's status as a public-private partnership and its pioneering efforts to use open source intellectual property for moving technologies and medications into proprietary drug discovery programs. Merck's funding will support pre-competitive research into small inhibitory molecules (chemical probes) to study epigenetic mechanisms of regulation, expanding the understanding of biology in multiple disease areas such as cancer and inflammatory diseases. With labs at the Univ of Toronto and Oxford Univ, SGC partners include a who's who of large pharmaceutical firms and funding agencies....