The laboratory of Dr. Stuart Schreiber, the Harvard-trained organic chemist and founding professor at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, has created a powerful, revolutionary method of synthetic chemistry to actually reach the goal of targeting cancer dependencies - diversity oriented synthesis. "It's likely that many of the proteome's 100,000 proteins have multifunctional roles in cancer, and it follows that molecules that control them will yield a therapeutic benefit," he says.

In 2002, the NCI Office of Cancer Genomics selected Dr. Schreiber's lab as a center in the Initiative for Chemical Genetics (ICG). As the number of useful small molecules they could develop became apparent, a more comprehensive strategy began to coalesce into a new field altogether, known as chemical biology. The ICG essentially provides a national laboratory for high-throughput, small-molecule screening, and has generated and analyzed data for more than 100 different research groups.

Another open-source, data-sharing model Dr. Schreiber has developed is ChemBank, a public, Web-based informatics environment to facilitate chemical genetics.

Chembank provides life scientists access to tools that are associated with private sector industry, and to data from hundreds of biomedically relevant assays that link the states of healthy and diseased cells to more than 700,000 small molecules. This kind of community resource, Dr. Schreiber believes, "enables the drug-hunting community to become more than the sum of its parts."