Distributed Drug Discovery (D3) is a contextualized educational laboratory program designed to integrally involve undergraduate science students in an important humanitarian problem: the identification of drug leads for the treatment of neglected and orphan diseases, such as malaria.  This goal is accomplished primarily by distributing the core scientific disciplines involved in drug lead discovery (computational chemistry, synthetic chemistry, and biological screening) to multiple academic sites nationally and internationally. As a proof of concept, the syntheses of 16 analogs of an anti-malarial hit compound were distributed to undergraduate students at four academic institutions as part of either an undergraduate laboratory or research laboratory at their respective institutions.  A control compound was synthesized across all sites to ensure that the protocol was robust and repeatable and that poor reaction outcomes could be investigated systematically.  All new compounds were synthesized in replicate by at least two separate sites to assess reproducibility by students. This small library of compounds was designed based on previous student-generated molecules found active in National Institutes of Health anti-malarial screens.  The undergraduate-synthesized molecules will be screened against malarial parasites, as well as several other neglected diseases. This distributed synthesis was carried out using the first fully authenticated D3 procedure.  The processes and standards for creating these D3 procedures, including laboratory educational materials, replication, and second-site authentication, will be discussed.  The results of this distributed synthesis will also be presented.

Distributed Drug Discovery (D3): Developing national and international distributed educational processes and standards in the context of identifying antimalarial lead compounds

246th National Meeting (2013)

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