EECS Professor Luke Huan will lead the Computational Chemical Biology (CCB) Core for a Newly Funded National Institutes of Health Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) focusing on Chemical Biology of Infectious Disease

Professor Luke Huan will lead the Computational Chemical Biology (CCB) Core. The CCB will provide comprehensive computational support, including chemical virtual screening, physical property prediction, target validation, hit identification, lead optimization, pharmacophore identification and pharmacokinetic and dynamic modeling. In addition, the core will provide information management infrastructure supporting the creation and management of scientific data analysis workflows, project reporting and database management for chemicals, including their structures and biological properties. These activities will be fully integrated with the three program projects, a) quorum-sensing regulator of virulence, b) resistance modifying agents for aminoglycoside antibiotics, and c) genomic and chemical approaches for discovering novel anti-poxvirus strategies as well as with other two program cores a) infectious disease assay and b) infectious disease assay development and medicinal chemistry. For example, the analysis of high-throughput screening data and chemical structure-activity relationship data generated will be stored, indexed, computationally analyzed, and visualized at the CCB core. The CCB core will provide a one-stop service for developing small chemical probes in order to better understand and modulate infectious diseases. This is the second time Huan lead a core service for large a NIH center. He served as the Director of the Cheminformatics Core that is associated with the KU NIH Specialized Chemistry Center.