Temple center a research resource for drug industry

Until recently, Magid Abou-Gharbia had to endure good-natured ribbing from his wife about the grand aspirations of the Moulder Center for Drug Discovery Research, the facility he heads at Temple University.

"My wife used to tease me and say I had a virtual center - a few boxes and myself," he said with a laugh last week.

Well, he still has boxes - unopened crates, really - but there is also a growing staff, newly arriving equipment, more funding, and, most important, an expanding mission.

The Moulder Center was launched two years ago with a $500,000 gift from Lonnie Moulder and his wife, Sharon, 1980 graduates of the School of Pharmacy.

Abou-Gharbia, 60, was selected to run it. The Moulder Center had been a rather modest undertaking until recently, Abou-Gharbia said, when the university agreed to make what he called a substantial investment in the project.

With 26 years of experience developing drugs at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Abou-Gharbia now hopes the Moulder Center can become a booming regional research-and-development facility for the pharmaceutical industry.

With the blessing of Temple and the support of its School of Pharmacy, Abou-Gharbia is adding researchers (for a total of 11), collaborating with doctors and scientists throughout the university, and teaming with area bio-tech companies to accelerate the search for treatments for some of the most vexing health problems.

For instance, Domenico Pratico, a professor at Temple University Medical School, is collaborating with the Moulder Center to find treatment for Alzheimer's disease. And Sherin S. Abdel-Meguid, president of Shifa Biomedical Corp. in Malvern, has enlisted the Moulder Center to help his company in its search for cholesterol-lowering drugs.

"They really have a fantastic operation where they are ready to make compounds for collaborators," Abdel-Meguid said, noting that the Moulder Center helped his firm develop a potential new drug now in clinical trials. "Most important is the wealth of knowledge a person like Magid has. That is a key for us."

Abou-Gharbia said he saw the Moulder Center as a response to an ever-growing need in the pharmaceutical industry for effective new drugs.

There was a time when industry giants such as Wyeth had the interest in pouring vast resources into drug development.

However, with the increasing costs attached to such work - it can take upward of $1 billion to create a new drug and bring it to clinical trials, according the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development - and the hit-or-miss nature of the process, big pharmaceutical companies are looking for shortcuts.

One way is to buy smaller start-up companies once they have done the spade work needed to identify drugs with potential.

The Moulder Center hopes to become another source of new compounds that hold the promise of disease management.

To do so, it has put together a "library" of 20,000 chemical compounds that, with cutting-edge automated lab equipment and topflight researchers, can be rapidly tested against "targets," or biologic causes or suspected causes of some human malady.

For instance, a researcher might suspect a particular protein in the progress of Alzheimer's disease.

The way to test that theory is to find a chemical compound that counteracts the protein and see if it has a salutary effect, initially at the cellular level.

The Moulder Center has the capability to test thousands of chemicals against a target in a matter of days.

"In one room, we have three-quarter of a million dollars in equipment to do screening," Abou-Gharbia said. "We are actually screening compounds against targets implicated in diseases."

The center provides designer work as well, refashioning and improving chemical compounds known to be effective.

"Sometimes, the good news is we have identified a preliminary chemical that can do something good," said Pratico, of the Temple medical school. "The bad news is it is not very potent or effective. Magid's job is to take this molecule and make variations of it that might be more effective, more potent, variations we can test."

The process is made all the easier for Pratico with the Moulder Center directly across the street.

"It is wonderful when you have a neighbor who can do this," he said.

The Moulder Center's capabilities are growing as a result of a 2009 National Institutes of Health grant for nearly $1 million that was to go to fund research.

Additional money from Temple was used to purchase automated equipment for rapidly testing thousands of compounds and the optical tools needed to check the results.

Recently delivered, the equipment still sits in crates, awaiting unpacking.

"As you can see," Abou-Gharbia said, "we are no longer virtual."