To enable researchers from European institutes to extend innovative structural biology research, the EU has invested 10 million euro to iNEXT-Discovery, through its Horizon 2020 program. The iNEXT-Discovery consortium, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Anastassis Perrakis from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Oncode Institute, aims to facilitate the generation of knowledge for the development of new drugs, advanced vaccines, novel biomaterials, engineered enzymes for food production, efficient biofuels, and other benefits. iNEXT-Discovery will do this by enabling leading European facilities to offer advanced technological instrumentation and expertise to all European scientists, allowing them to perform high-end structural biology research with state-of-the-art equipment that is often unavailable in their home countries.
Joining forces within the iNEXT-Discovery consortium also enables the partners to collaborate in joint research activities that will allow new and better ways to perform structural biology experiments. iNEXT-Discovery will build on the expertise of the partners to: further consolidate the strong role of structural biology in drug development by developing fragment-based lead discovery; develop tools to increase the throughput for electron microscopy and serial X-ray crystallography; integrate structural biology technologies; push nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and other technologies to better describe time scales, molecular states and dynamics; and integrate structural biology approaches for imaging cells.
iNEXT-Discovery includes partners from institutions outside of the facility providers that also collaborate on planned joint research projects. Prof. Dr. Anastassis Perrakis from the Division of Biochemistry at the NKI and Oncode Institute explains: "Together with regional experts, specifically from the Baltic and Balkan countries, and with five ESFRI communities in the fields of health, biotechnology, and food, we are offering cutting-edge technologies and novel experimental possibilities to all European scientists, enabling experiments that would be impossible without our facilities." Integration will be further enabled through the extensive and inclusive training program that the iNEXT-Discovery has developed, and that will be deployed in the coming four years.