Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery

Drug Discovery Building Overview

Our Drug Discovery facility promotes the discovery, design and development of new drugs through innovative architecture that encourages collaborations in chemistry, medicinal chemistry and biology. The structure accommodates 90 multidisciplinary researchers with 9 faculty offices as well as several conference rooms and common eating facilities. Conference rooms are equipped with videoconferencing capabilities that enable research teams from across the world to interact as though they were present at Purdue. The building provides facilities for organic synthesis, cell culture, analytical chemistry, molecule purification, biochemistry, molecular biology and fluorescent imaging.  Core facilities located within the building include the high-throughput screening & chemical genomics, NMR, and mass spectrometry facilities.

NMR

The Drug Discovery building hosts a Bruker AV-III-500-HD 500 Mhz NMR supported by the Purdue Interdepartmental NMR Facility.  It is equipped with a 5 mm BBFO Z-gradient cryoprobe Prodigy, two RF channels with waveform generation, H2-decoupling capability, Z-axis field gradient module, and a sample temperature control unit with a chiller unit.  It has a Linux host computer running TopSpin 3.2.  The cryoprobe prodigy endows this spectrometer with ~4 times the sensitivity of any NMR present on campus for X-nucleus observation, such as 13C or 31P.  It also has by far the highest sensitivity for 19F observation.

Mass Spectrometry

The Drug Discovery building hosts one of the satellite facilities for the analytical mass spectrometry facility, part of the metabolite profiling facility.  This facility is equipped with an Agilent high resolution 6550 quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) LC-MS for high mass accuracy applications, an Agilent 5975C GC/MS for volatile components to m/z < 1000 Da, and an Applied Biosystems Voyager DE PRO matrix-assisted laser desorption (MALDI) for nonvolatile components to m/z < 100,000 Da.

Shared Cell Culture

The Drug Discovery building hosts two shared mammalian cell culture facilities.  These facilities are equipped with standard culturing equipment such as: biosafety cabinets, CO2 incubators, centrifuge, microscopes and a ViCell counter.

Shared Equipment

The Drug Discovery building hosts several shared pieces of equipment including:

  • Flow cytometer – Invitrogen Attune NxT
  • FT IR – ThermoFisher Nicolet is50 FT IR
  • Gel/Blot imaging station – ProteinSimple FluorChem R
  • FPLC – GE Healthcare AKTA
  • Prep LC-MS – Waters AutoPurification System